LIFE OF ALCAEUS Cicero Luseulan Disputations: Aleaeus was a brave man and eminent in the state to which he belonged, and yet what extravagant things he savs of the love of youths "1 Horace Odes: . . . Come sing me a Latin song, thou lyre first played by a citizen of Lesbos, a gallant warrior who, alike amid the very fight or when his storm-tossed ship was moored to the wet 9 > 1) r shore,? sang of Bacchus and the Muses, of Venus and her inseparable boy, and of the beautiful Lycus so dark of eye and hair. The Same: . . . and thee, Aleaeus, chanting with fuller note unto thy golden quill the toils of the sea, the tvuils of exile, and the toils of war.? Dionysius of Halicarnassus Critique of the Ancient Writers: only look at the nobility of Alcacus, his conciseness, his sweetness—so far as they are not impaired by his dialect—, and above all the moral tone of his Political Poems. Often if the reader could but remove the metre he would find political rhetoric.4 Quintilian Principles of Oratory: Alcacus is rightly awarded the ‘ golden quill’ in that part of his works where he assails the tyrants; his ethical value too is great, and his style is concise, lofty, exact, and very like Homer's: but he stoops to jesting and love- making though better fitted for higher themes. the ship of state 9 of. Kar. oh ἃ. GO. 1, ». 1. 9-2, =. 2. mm, Porph. awl Aer. ad Jae, aml Jul. Wie, p. 438 Ti. > oh. Comp. 24, Synes. Som. 156. 513