TYRTÆUS, an Athenian general and musician, is celebrated by all antiquity for the composition of military songs and airs, as well as the performance of them. He was called to the assistance of the Lacedæmonians in the second war with the Messenians, about 685 B. C.; and a memorable victory which they obtained over that people is attributed by the ancient scholars upon Horace to the animating sound of a new military flute or clarion, invented and played upon by Tyrtæus. Plutarch tells us that they gave him the freedom of their city; and that his military airs were constantly sung and played in the Spartan army to the last hour of the republic. And Lycurgus the orator, in his oration against Leocrates, says, "The Spartans made a law, that whenever they were in arms, and going out upon any military expedition, they should all be first summoned to the king's tent to hear the songs of Tyrtæus?" thinking it the best means of sending them forth in a disposition to die with pleasure for their country. Frag.
ments of his poetry, in elegiac verse, are preserved in Stobæus, Lycurgus Orat. in Fulvius Ursinus, at the end of Poems by illustrious Women; and in the Oxford edition of Eleg. & Lyric. Frag. & Scholia, printed 1759. See Edwards, &c.