Athenian coup of 411 BC state of Athens remained an anomaly, however, as the rest of the Greek city states were run either as tyrannies or, most often, by oligarchies. Both Thucydides and Aristotle wrote that "the revolution was provoked by defeat in Sicily." Despite the democracy in Athens, Greek tradition remained aristocratic, and the works of Homer celebrated an aristocratic world view, where the nobles made decisions and the commoners obeyed. The poems of Theognis of Megara (from the sixth century BC) and the Theban poet Pindar (of the fifth century BC) were popular among the Athenian nobles at this time, casting democracy as
The Lucy poems critic David Rannie praised the poems as a whole: "that strange little lovely group, which breathe a passion unfamiliar to Wordsworth, and about which he—so ready to talk about the genesis of his poems—has told us nothing [...] Let a poet keep some of his secrets: we need not grudge him the privacy when the poetry is as beautiful as this; when there is such celebration of girlhood, love, and death [...] The poet's sense of loss is sublime in its utter simplicity. He finds harmony rather than harshness in the contrast between the illusion of love and the fact