CHAPTER I

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SELECT EPIGRAMS FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY

By J. W. Mackail

First Published 1890 by Longmans, Green, and Co.

Etext prepared by John Bickers, jbickers@ihug.co.nz

and Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com

SELECT EPIGRAMS FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY

EDITED WITH A REVISED TEXT, TRANSLATION, AND NOTES

BY

J. W. MACKAIL

Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

PREPARER'S NOTE

This book was published in 1890 by Longmans, Green, and Co.,

London; and New York: 15 East 16th Street.

The epigrams in the book are given both in Greek and in English.

This text includes only the English. Where Greek is present in

short citations, it has been given here in transliterated form and

marked with brackets. A chapter of Notes on the translations has

also been omitted.

{eti pou proima leuxoia}

Meleager in /Anth. Pal./ iv. 1.

Dim now and soil'd,

Like the soil'd tissue of white violets

Left, freshly gather'd, on their native bank.

M. Arnold, /Sohrab and Rustum/.

PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to present a complete collection, subject

to certain definitions and exceptions which will be mentioned later,

of all the best extant Greek Epigrams. Although many epigrams not

given here have in different ways a special interest of their own,

none, it is hoped, have been excluded which are of the first

excellence in any style. But, while it would be easy to agree on

three-fourths of the matter to be included in such a scope, perhaps

hardly any two persons would be in exact accordance with regard to the

rest; with many pieces which lie on the border line of excellence, the

decision must be made on a balance of very slight considerations, and

becomes in the end one rather of personal taste than of any fixed

principle.

For the Greek Anthology proper, use has chiefly been made of the two

great works of Jacobs, which have not yet been superseded by any more

definitive edition: /Anthologia Graeca sive Poetarum Graecorum lusus

ex recensione Brunckii; indices et commentarium adiecit Friedericus

Iacobs/ (Leipzig, 1794-1814: four volumes of text and nine of indices,

prolegomena, commentary, and appendices), and /Anthologia Graeca ad

fidem codicis olim Palatini nunc Parisini ex apographo Gothano edita;

curavit epigrammata in Codice Palatino desiderata et annotationem

criticam adiecit Fridericus Jacobs/ (Leipzig, 1813-1817: two volumes

of text and two of critical notes). An appendix to the latter contains

Paulssen's fresh collation of the Palatine MS. The small Tauchnitz

text is a very careless and inaccurate reprint of this edition. The

most convenient edition of the Anthology for ordinary reference is

that of F. Dübner in Didot's /Bibliothèque Grecque/ (Paris, 1864), in

two volumes, with a revised text, a Latin translation, and additional

notes by various hands. The epigrams recovered from inscriptions have

been collected and edited by G. Kaibel in his /Epigrammata Graeca ex

labidibus conlecta/ (Berlin, 1878). As this book was going through the

press, a third volume of the Didot Anthology has appeared, edited by

M. Ed. Cougny, under the title of /Appendix nova epigrammatum veterum

ex libris at marmoribus ductorum/, containing what purports to be a

complete collection, now made for the first time, of all extant

epigrams not in the Anthology.

In the notes, I have not thought it necessary to acknowledge, except

here once for all, my continual obligations to that superb monument of

scholarship, the commentary of Jacobs; but where a note or a reading

is borrowed from a later critic, his name is mentioned. All important

deviations from the received text of the Anthology are noted, and

referred to their author in each case; but, as this is not a critical

edition, the received text, when retained, is as a rule printed

without comment where it differs from that of the MSS. or other

originals.

The references in the notes to Bergk's /Lyrici Graeci/ give the pages

of the fourth edition. Epigrams from the Anthology are quoted by the

sections of the Palatine collection (/Anth. Pal./) and the appendices

to it (sections xiii-xv). After these appendices follows in modern

editions a collection (/App. Plan./) of all the epigrams in the

Planudean Anthology which are not found in the Palatine MS.

I have to thank Mr. P. E. Matheson, Fellow of New College, for his

kindness in looking over the proofsheets of this book.

INTRODUCTION

I

The Greek word "epigram" in its original meaning is precisely

equivalent to the Latin word "inscription"; and it probably came into

use in this sense at a very early period of Greek history, anterior

even to the invention of prose. Inscriptions at that time, if they

went beyond a mere name or set of names, or perhaps the bare statement

of a single fact, were necessarily in verse, then the single vehicle

of organised expression. Even after prose was in use, an obvious

propriety remained in the metrical form as being at once more striking

and more easily retained in the memory; while in the case of epitaphs

and dedications--for the earlier epigram falls almost entirely under

these two heads--religious feeling and a sense of what was due to

ancient custom aided the continuance of the old tradition. Herodotus

in the course of his History quotes epigrams of both kinds; and with

him the word {epigramma} is just on the point of acquiring its

literary sense, though this is not yet fixed definitely. In his

account of the three ancient tripods dedicated in the temple of Apollo

at Thebes,[1] he says of one of them, {o men de eis ton tripodon

epigramma ekhei}, and then quotes the single hexameter line engraved

upon it. Of the other two he says simply, "they say in hexameter,"

{legei en exametro tono}. Again, where he describes the funeral

monuments at Thermopylae,[2] he uses the words {gramma} and

{epigramma} almost in the sense of sepulchural epigrams; {epigegrammai

grammata legonta tade}, and a little further on, {epixosmesantes

epigrammasi xai stelesi}, "epitaphs and monuments". Among these

epitaphs is the celebrated couplet of Simonides[3] which has found a

place in all subsequent Anthologies.

In the Anthology itself the word does not however in fact occur till a

late period. The proem of Meleager to his collection uses the words

{soide}, {umnos}, {melisma}, {elegos}, all vaguely, but has no term

which corresponds in any degree to our epigram. That of Philippus has

one word which describes the epigram by a single quality; he calls his

work an {oligostikhia} or collection of poems not exceeding a few

lines in length. In an epitaph by Diodorus, a poet of the Augustan

age, occurs the phrase {gramma legei},[4] in imitation of the phrase

of Herodotus just quoted. This is, no doubt, an intentional archaism;

but the word {epigramma} itself does not occur in the collection until

the Roman period. Two epigrams on the epigram,[5] one Roman, the other

Roman or Byzantine, are preserved, both dealing with the question of

the proper length. The former, by Parmenio, merely says that an

epigram of many lines is bad--{phemi polustikhien epigrammatos ou xata

Mousas einai}. The other is more definite, but unfortunately ambiguous

in expression. It runs thus:

{Pagxalon eot epigramma to distikhon en de parelthes

tous treis rapsodeis xoux epigramma legeis}

The meaning of the first part is plain; an epigram may be complete

within the limits of a single couplet. But do "the three" mean three

lines or three couplets? "Exceeding three" would, in the one case,

mean an epigram of four lines, in the other of eight. As there cannot

properly be an epigram of three lines, it would seem rather to mean

the latter. Even so the statement is an exaggeration; many of the best

epigrams are in six and eight lines. But it is true that the epigram

may "have its nature", in the phrase of Aristotle,[6] in a single

couplet; and we shall generally find that in those of eight lines, as

always without exception in those of more than eight, there is either

some repetition of idea not necessary to the full expression of the

thought, or some redundance of epithet or detail too florid for the

best taste, or, as in most of the Byzantine epigrams, a natural

verbosity which affects the style throughout and weakens the force and

directness of the epigram.

The notorious difficulty of giving any satisfactory definition of

poetry is almost equalled by the difficulty of defining with precision

any one of its kinds; and the epigram in Greek, while it always

remained conditioned by being in its essence and origin an

inscriptional poem, took in the later periods so wide a range of

subject and treatment that it can perhaps only be limited by certain

abstract conventions of length and metre. Sometimes it becomes in all

but metrical form a lyric; sometimes it hardly rises beyond the

versified statement of a fact or an idea; sometimes it is barely

distinguishable from a snatch of pastoral. The shorter pieces of the

elegiac poets might very often well be classed as epigrams but for the

uncertainty, due to the form in which their text has come down to us,

whether they are not in all cases, as they undoubtedly are in some,

portions of longer poems. Many couplets and quatrains of Theognis fall

under this head; and an excellent instance on a larger scale is the

fragment of fourteen lines by Simonides of Amorgos,[7] which is the

exact type on which many of the later epigrams of life are moulded. In

such cases /respice auctoris animum/ is a safe rule; what was not

written as an epigram is not an epigram. Yet it has seemed worth while

to illustrate this rule by its exceptions; and there will be found in

this collection fragments of Mimnermus and Theognis[8] which in

everything but the actual circumstance of their origin satisfy any

requirement which can be made. In the Palatine Anthology itself,

indeed, there are a few instances[9] where this very thing is done. As

a rule, however, these short passages belong to the class of {gromai}

or moral sentences, which, even when expressed in elegiac verse, is

sufficiently distinct from the true epigram. One instance will

suffice. In the Anthology there occurs this couplet:[10]

{Pan to peritton axaipon epei logos esti palaios

os xai tou melitos to pleon esti khole}

This is a sentence merely; an abstract moral idea, with an

illustration attached to it. Compare with it another couplet[11] in

the Anthology:

{Aion panta pserei dolikhos khronos oioen ameibein

ounoma xai morpsen xai psuain ede tukhen}

Here too there is a moral idea; but in the expression, abstract as it

is, there is just that high note, that imaginative touch, which gives

it at once the gravity of an inscription and the quality of a poem.

Again, many of the so-called epideictic epigrams are little more than

stories told shortly in elegiac verse, much like the stories in Ovid's

Fasti. Here the inscriptional quality is the surest test. It is this

quality, perhaps in many instances due to the verses having been

actually written for paintings or sculptures, that just makes an

epigram of the sea-story told by Antipater of Thessalonica, and of the

legend of Eunomus the harp-player[12]; while other stories, such as

those told of Pittacus, of Euctemon, of Serapis and the murderer,[13]

both tend to exceed the reasonable limit of length, and have in no

degree either the lapidary precision of the half lyrical passion which

would be necessary to make them more than tales in verse. Once more,

the fragments of idyllic poetry which by chance have come down to us

incorporated in the Anthology,[14] beautiful as they are, are in no

sense epigrams any more than the lyrics ascribed to Anacreon which

form an appendix to the Palatine collection, or the quotations from

the dramatists, Euripides, Menander, or Diphilus,[15] which have also

at one time or another become incorporated with it.

In brief then, the epigram in its first intention may be described as

a very short poem summing up as though in a memorial inscription what

it is desired to make permanently memorable in any action or

situation. It must have the compression and conciseness of a real

inscription, and in proportion to the smallness of its bulk must be

highly finished, evenly balanced, simple, and lucid. In literature it

holds something of the same place as is held in art by an engraved

gem. But if the definition of the epigram is only fixed thus, it is

difficult to exclude almost any very short poem that conforms

externally to this standard; while on the other hand the chance of

language has restricted the word in its modern use to a sense which it

never bore in Greek at all, defined in the line of Boileau, /un bon

mot de deux rimes orné/. This sense was made current more especially

by the epigrams of Martial, which as a rule lead up to a pointed end,

sometimes a witticism, sometimes a verbal fancy, and are quite apart

from the higher imaginative qualities. From looking too exclusively at

the Latin epigrammatists, who all belonged to a debased period in

literature, some persons have been led to speak of the Latin as

distinct from the Greek sense of the word "epigram". But in the Greek

Anthology the epigrams of contemporary writers have the same quality.

The fault was that of the age, not of the language. No good epigram

sacrifices its finer poetical qualities to the desire of making a

point; and none of the best depend on having a point at all.

----------

[1] Hdt. v. 59.

[2] Hdt. vii. 228.

[3] III. 4 in this collection.

[4] Anth. Pal. vi. 348.

[5] Ibid. ix. 342, 369.

[6] Poet. 1449 a. 14.

[7] Simon. fr. 85 Bergk.

[8] Infra, XII. 6, 17, 37.

[9] App. Plan. 16.

[10] Anth. Pal. ix. 50, 118, x. 113.

[11] Anth. Pal. ix. 51.

[12] Infra, IX. 14, II. 14.

[13] Anth. Pal. vii. 89, ix. 367, 378.

[14] Anth. Pal. ix. 136, 362, 363.

[15] Ibid. x. 107, xi. 438, 439.

II

While the epigram is thus somewhat incapable of strict formal

definition, for all practical purposes it may be confined in Greek

poetry to pieces written in a single metre, the elegiac couplet, the

metre appropriated to inscriptions from the earliest recorded

period.[1] Traditionally ascribed to the invention of Archilochus or

Callinus, this form of verse, like the epic hexameter itself, first

meets us full grown.[2] The date of Archilochus of Paros may be fixed

pretty nearly at 700 B.C. That of Callinus of Ephesus is perhaps

earlier. It may be assumed with probability that elegy was an

invention of the same early civilisation among the Greek colonists of

the eastern coast of the Aegean in which the Homeric poems flowered

out into their splendid perfection. From the first the elegiac metre

was instinctively recognised as one of the best suited for

inscriptional poems. Originally indeed it had a much wider area, as it

afterwards had again with the Alexandrian poets; it seems to have been

the common metre for every kind of poetry which was neither purely

lyrical on the one hand, nor on the other included in the definite

scope of the heroic hexameter. The name {elegos}, "wailing", is

probably as late as Simonides, when from the frequency of its use for

funeral inscriptions the metre had acquired a mournful connotation,

and become the /tristis elegeïa/ of the Latin poets. But the war-

chants of Callinus and Tyrtaeus, and the political poems of the

latter, are at least fifty years earlier in date than the elegies of

Mimnermus, the first of which we have certain knowledge: and in

Theognis, a hundred years later than Mimnermus, elegiac verse becomes

a vehicle for the utmost diversity of subject, and a vehicle so facile

and flexible that it never seems unsuitable or inadequate. For at

least eighteen hundred years it remained a living metre, through all

that time never undergoing any serious modification.[3] Almost up to

the end of the Greek Empire of the East it continued to be written, in

imitation it is true of the old poets, but still with the freedom of a

language in common and uninterrupted use. As in the heroic hexameter

the Asiatic colonies of Greece invented the most fluent, stately, and

harmonious metre for continuous narrative poetry which has yet been

invented by man, so in the elegiac couplet they solved the problem,

hardly a less difficult one, of a metre which would refuse nothing,

which could rise to the occasion and sink with it, and be equally

suited to the epitaph of a hero or the verses accompanying a birthday

present, a light jest or a great moral idea, the sigh of a lover or

the lament over a perished Empire.[4]

The Palatine Anthology as it has come down to us includes a small

proportion, less than one in ten, of poems in other metres than the

elegiac. Some do not properly belong to the collection, as for

instance the three lines of iambics heading the Erotic section and the

two hendecasyllabics at the end of it, or the two hexameters at the

beginning of the Dedicatory section. These are hardly so much

insertions as accretions. Apart from them there are only four non-

elegiac pieces among the three hundred and eight amatory epigrams. The

three hundred and fifty-eight dedicatory epigrams include sixteen in

hexameter and iambic, and one in hendecasyllabic; and among the seven

hundred and fifty sepulchral epigrams are forty-two in hexameter,

iambic, and other mixed metres. The Epideictic section, as one would

expect from the more miscellaneous nature of its contents, has a

larger proportion of non-elegiac pieces. Of the eight hundred and

twenty-seven epigrams no less than a hundred and twenty-nine are in

hexameter (they include a large number of single lines), twenty-seven

in iambic, and six others in various unusual metres, besides one (No.

703) which comes in strangely enough: it is in prose: and is the

inscription in commendation of the water of the Thracian river Tearos,

engraved on a pillar by Darius, transcribed from Herodotus, iv. 91.

The odd thing is that the collector of the Anthology appears to have

thought it was in verse. The Hortatory section includes a score of

hexameter and iambic fragments, some of them proverbial lines, others

extracts from the tragedians. The Convivial section has five-and-

twenty in hexameter, iambic, and hemiambic, out of four hundred and

forty-two. The Musa Stratonis, in which the hand of the Byzantine

editor has had a less free play, is entirely in elegiac. But the short

appendix next following it in the Palatine MS. consists entirely of

epigrams in various metres, chiefly composite. Of the two thousand

eight hundred and thirteen epigrams which constitute the Palatine

Anthology proper, (sections V., VI., VII., IX., X., and XI.), there

are in all a hundred and seventy-five in hexameter, seventy-seven in

iambic, and twenty-two in various other metres. In practise, when one

comes to make a selection, the exclusion of all non-elegiac pieces

leads to no difficulty.

Nothing illustrates more vividly the essential unity and continuous

life of Greek literature than this line of poetry, reaching from the

period of the earliest certain historical records down to a time when

modern poetry in the West of Europe had already established itself;

nothing could supply a better and simpler corrective to the fallacy,

still too common, that Greek history ends with the conquests of

Alexander. It is on some such golden bridge that we must cross the

profound gulf which separates, to the popular view, the sunset of the

Western Empire of Rome from the dawn of the Italian republics and the

kingdoms of France and England. That gulf to most persons seems

impassable, and it is another world which lies across it. But here one

sees how that distant and strange world stretches out its hands to

touch our own. The great burst of epigrammatic poetry under Justinian

took place when the Consulate of Rome, after more than a thousand

years' currency, at last ceased to mark the Western year. While

Constantinus Cephalas was compiling his Anthology, adding to the

treasures of past times much recent and even contemporary work,

Athelstan of England inflicted the great defeat on the Danes at

Brunanburh, the song of which is one of the noblest records of our own

early literature; and before Planudes made the last additions the

Divine Comedy was written, and our English poetry had broken out into

the full sweetness of its flower:

Bytuene Mershe ant Averil

When spray beginneth to springe,

The lutel foul hath hire wyl

On hyre lud to synge.[5]

It is startling to think that so far as the date goes this might have

been included in the Planudean Anthology.

Yet this must not be pressed too far. Greek literature at the later

Byzantine Court, like the polity and religion of the Empire, was a

matter of rigid formalism; and so an epigram by Cometas Chartularius

differs no more in style and spirit from an epigram by Agathias than

two mosaics of the same dates. The later is a copy of the earlier,

executed in a somewhat inferior manner. Even in the revival of poetry

under Justinian it is difficult to be sure how far the poetry was in

any real sense original, and how far it is parallel to the Latin

verses of Renaissance scholars. The vocabulary of these poets is

practically the same as that of Callimachus; but the vocabulary of

Callimachus too is practically the same as that of Simonides.

----------

[1] The first inscriptions of all were probably in hexameter: cf. Hdt.

v. 59.

[2] Horace, A. P., ll. 75-8, leaves the origin of elegiac verse in

obscurity. When he says it was first used for laments, he probably

follows the Alexandrian derivation of the word {elegos} from {e

legein}. The /voti sententia compos/ to which he says it became

extended is interpreted by the commentators as meaning amatory

poetry. If this was Horace's meaning he chose a most singular way

of expressing it.

[3] Mr. F. D. Allen's treatise /On Greek Versification in

Inscriptions/ (Boston, 1888) gives an account of the slight

changes in structure (caesura, etc.) between earlier and later

periods.

[4] Cf. infra, III. 2, VII., 4, X. 45, XII. 18, I. 30, IX. 23.

[5] From the Leominster MS. circ. A.D. 1307 (Percy Society, 1842).

III

The material out of which this selection has been made is principally

that immense mass of epigrams known as the Greek Anthology. An account

of this celebrated collection and the way in which it was formed will

be given presently; here it will be sufficient to say that, in

addition to about four hundred Christian epigrams of the Byzantine

period, it contains some three thousand seven hundred epigrams of all

dates from 700 B.C. to 1000 or even 1200 A.D., preserved in two

Byzantine collections, the one probably of the tenth, the other of the

fourteenth century, named respectively the Palatine and Planudean

Anthologies. The great mass of the contents of both is the same; but

the former contains a large amount of material not found in the

latter, and the latter a small amount not found in the former.

For much the greatest number of these epigrams the Anthology is the

only source. But many are also found cited by various authors or

contained among their other works. It is not necessary to pursue this

subject into detail. A few typical instances are the citations of the

epitaph by Simonides on the three hundred Spartans who fell at

Thermopylae, not only by Herodotus[1] but by Diodorus Siculus and

Strabo, the former in a historical, the latter in a geographical,

work: of the epigram by Plato on the Eretrian exiles[2] by

Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius: of many epigrams purporting to

be written by philosophers, or actually written upon them and their

works, by Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives of the Philosophers. Plutarch

among the vast mass of his historical and ethical writings quotes

incidentally a considerable number of epigrams. A very large number

are quoted by Athenaeus in that treasury of odds and ends, the

Deipnosophistae. A great many too are cited in the lexicon which goes

under the name of Suidas, and which, beginning at an unknown date,

continued to receive additional entries certainly up to the eleventh

century.

These same sources supply us with a considerable gleaning of epigrams

which either were omitted by the collectors of the Anthology or have

disappeared from our copies. The present selection for example

includes epigrams found in an anonymous Life of Aeschylus: in the

Onamasticon of Julius Pollux, a grammarian of the early part of the

third century, who cites from many lost writings for peculiar words or

constructions: and from the works of Athenaeus , Diogenes Laërtius,

Plutarch, and Suidas mentioned above. The more famous the author of an

epigram was, the more likely does it become that his work should be

preserved in more than one way. Thus, of the thirty-one epigrams

ascribed to Plato, while all but one are found in the Anthology, only

seventeen are found in the Anthology alone. Eleven are quoted by

Diogenes Laërtius; and thirteen wholly or partially by Athenaeus,

Suidas, Apuleius, Philostratus, Gellius, Macrobius, Olympiodorus,

Apostolius, and Thomas Magister. On the other hand the one hundred and

thirty-four epigrams of Meleager, representing a peculiar side of

Greek poetry in a perfection not elsewhere attainable, exist in the

Anthology alone.

Beyond these sources, which may be called literary, there is another

class of great importance: the monumental. An epigram purports to be

an inscription actually carved or written upon some monument or

memorial. Since archaeology became systematically studied, original

inscriptions, chiefly on marble, are from time to time brought to

light, many of which are in elegiac verse. The admirable work of

Kaibel[3] has made it superfluous to traverse the vast folios of the

Corpus Inscriptionum in search of what may still be hidden there. It

supplies us with several epigrams of real literary value; while the

best of those discovered before this century are included in

appendices to the great works of Brunck and Jacobs. Most of these

monumental inscriptions are naturally sepulchral. They are of all ages

and countries within the compass of Graeco-Roman civilisation, from

the epitaph, magnificent in its simplicity, sculptured on the grave of

Cleoetes the Athenian when Athens was still a small and insignificant

town, to the last outpourings of the ancient spirit on the tombs

reared, among strange gods and barbarous faces, over Paulina of

Ravenna or Vibius Licinianus of Nîmes.[4]

It has already been pointed out by how slight a boundary the epigram

is kept distinct from other forms of poetry, and how in extreme cases

its essence may remain undefinable. The two fragments of Theognis and

one of Mimnermus included here[5] illustrate this. They are examples

of a large number like them, which are not, strictly speaking,

epigrams; being probably passages from continuous poems, selected, at

least in the case of Theognis, for an Anthology of his works.

The epigrams extant in literature which are not in the Anthology are,

with a few exceptions, collected in the appendix to the edition of

Jacobs, and are reprinted from it in modern texts. They are about four

hundred in number, and raise the total number of epigrams in the

Anthology to about four thousand five hundred; to these must be added

at least a thousand inscriptional epigrams, which increase year by

year as new explorations are carried on. It is, of course, but seldom

that these last have distinct value as poetry. Those of the best

period, indeed, and here the best period is the sixth century B.C.,

have always a certain accent, even when simplest and most matter of

fact, which reminds us of the palace whence they came. Their

simplicity is more thrilling than any eloquence. From the exotic and

elaborate word-embroidery of the poets of the decadence, we turn with

relief and delight to work like this, by a father over his son:

{Sema pater Kleoboulos apepsthimeno Xenopsanto

thexe tod ant aretes ede saopsrosunes}[6]

(This monument to dead Xenophantus his father Cleobulus set up, for

his valour and wisdom);

or this, on an unmarried girl:

{Sema PHrasixleias xoure xexlesomai aiei

anti gamou para theon touto lakhous onoma}[7]

(The monument of Phrasicleia; I shall for ever be called maiden,

having got this name from the gods instead of marriage.)

So touching in their stately reserve, so piercing in their delicate

austerity, these epitaphs are in a sense the perfection of literature,

and yet in another sense almost lie outside its limits. For the

workmanship here, we feel, is unconscious; and without conscious

workmanship there is not art. In Homer, in Sophocles, in all the best

Greek work, there is this divine simplicity; but beyond it, or rather

beneath it and sustaining it, there is purpose.

----------

[1] Anth. Pal. vii. 249; Hdt. vii. 228.

[2] Ibid. vii. 256.

[3] Epigrammata Graeca ex lapidibus conlecta. Berlin, 1878.

[4] Infra, III. 35, 47; XI. 48.

[5] Infra, XII. 6, 17, 37.

[6] Corp. Inscr. Att. 477 B.

[7] Ibid. 469.

IV

From the invention of writing onwards, the inscriptions on monuments

and dedicated offerings supplied one of the chief materials of

historical record. Their testimony was used by the earliest historians

to supplement and reinforce the oral traditions which they embodied in

their works. Herodotus and Thucydides quote early epigrams as

authority for the history of past times;[1] and when in the latter

part of the fourth century B.C. history became a serious study

throughout Greece, collections of inscribed records, whether in prose

or verse, began to be formed as historical material. The earliest

collection of which anything is certainly known was a work by

Philochorus,[2] a distinguished Athenian antiquary who flourished

about 300 B.C., entitled Epigramma Attica. It appears to have been a

transcript of all the ancient Attic inscriptions dealing with Athenian

history, and would include the verses engraved on the tombs of

celebrated citizens, or on objects dedicated in the temples on public

occasions. A century later, we hear of a work by Polemo, called

Periegetes, or the "Guidebook-maker," entitled {peri ton xata poleis

epigrammaton}.[3] This was an attempt to make a similar collection of

inscriptions throughout the cities of Greece. Athenaeus also speaks of

authors otherwise unknown, Alcetas and Menetor,[4] as having written

treatises {peri anathematon}, which would be collections of the same

nature confined to dedicatory inscriptions; and, these being as a rule

in verse, the books in question were perhaps the earliest collections

of monumental poetry. Even less is known with regard to a book "on

epigrams" by Neoptolemus of Paris.[5] The history of Anthologies

proper begins for us with Meleager of Gadara.

The collection called the Garland of Meleager, which is the basis of

the Greek Anthology as we possess it, was formed by him in the early

part of the first century B.C. The scholiast on the Palatine MS. says

that Meleager flourished in the reign of the last Seleucus ({ekhmasen

epi Seleukou tou eskhatou}). This is Seleucus VI. Epiphanes, the last

king of the name, who reigned B.C. 95-93; for it is not probable that

the reference is to the last Seleucid, Antiochus XIII., who acceded

B.C. 69, and was deposed by Pompey when he made Syria a Roman province

in B.C. 65. The date thus fixed is confirmed by the fact that the

collection included an epigram on the tomb of Antipater of Sidon,[6]

who, from the terms in which Cicero alludes to him, must have lived

till 110 or even 100 B.C., and that it did not include any of the

epigrams of Meleager's townsman Philodemus of Gadara, the friend of L.

Calpurnius Piso, consul in B.C. 58.

This Garland or Anthology has only come down to us as forming the

basis of later collections. But the prefatory poem which Meleager

wrote for it has fortunately been preserved, and gives us valuable

information as to the contents of the Garland. This poem,[7] in which

he dedicates his work to his friend or patron Diocles, gives the names

of forty-seven poets included by him besides many others of recent

times whom he does not specifically enumerate. It runs as follows:

"Dear Muse, for whom bringest thou this gardenful of song, or who is

he that fashioned the garland of poets? Meleager made it, and wrought

out this gift as a remembrance for noble Diocles, inweaving many

lilies of Anyte, and many martagons of Moero, and of Sappho little,

but all roses, and the narcissus of Melanippides budding into clear

hymns, and the fresh shoot of the vine-blossom of Simonides; twining

to mingle therewith the spice-scented flowering iris of Nossis, on

whose tablets love melted the wax, and with her, margerain from sweet-

breathed Rhianus, and the delicious maiden-fleshed crocus of Erinna,

and the hyacinth of Alcaeus, vocal among the poets, and the dark-

leaved laurel-spray of Samius, and withal the rich ivy-clusters of

Leonidas, and the tresses of Mnasalcas' sharp pine; and he plucked the

spreading plane of the song of Pamphilus, woven together with the

walnut shoots of Pancrates and the fair-foliaged white poplar of

Tymnes, and the green mint of Nicias, and the horn-poppy of Euphemus

growing on these sands; and with these Damagetas, a dark violet, and

the sweet myrtle-berry of Callimachus, ever full of pungent honey, and

the rose-campion of Euphorion, and the cyclamen of the Muses, him who

had his surname from the Dioscori. And with him he inwove Hegesippus,

a riotous grape-cluster, and mowed down the scented rush of Perses;

and withal the quince from the branches of Diotimus, and the first

pomegranate flowers of Menecrates, and the myrrh-twigs of Nicaenetus,

and the terebinth of Phaennus, and the tall wild pear of Simmias, and

among them also a few flowers of Parthenis, plucked from the blameless

parsley-meadow, and fruitful remnants from the honey-dropping Muses,

yellow ears from the corn-blade of Bacchylides; and withal Anacreon,

both that sweet song of his and his nectarous elegies, unsown honey-

suckle; and withal the thorn-blossom of Archilochus from a tangled

brake, little drops from the ocean; and with them the young olive-

shoots of Alexander, and the dark-blue cornflower of Polycleitus; and

among them he laid amaracus, Polystratus the flower of songs, and the

young Phoenician cypress of Antipater, and also set therein spiked

Syrian nard, the poet who sang of himself as Hermes' gift; and withal

Posidippus and Hedylus together, wild blossoms of the country, and the

blowing windflowers of the son of Sicelides; yea, and set therein the

golden bough of the ever divine Plato, shining everywhere in

excellence, and beside him Aratus the knower of the stars, cutting the

first-born spires of that heaven-high palm, and the fair-tressed lotus

of Chaeremon mixed with the gilliflower of Phaedimus, and the round

ox-eye of Antagoras, and the wine-loving fresh-blown wild thyme of

Theodorides, and the bean-blossoms of Phanias, and many newly-

scriptured shoots of others; and with them also even from his own Muse

some early white violets. But to my friends I give thanks; and the

sweet-languaged garland of the Muses is common to all initiate."

In this list three poets are not spoken of directly by name, but, from

metrical or other reasons, are alluded to paraphrastically. "He who

had his surname from the Dioscori" is Dioscorides; "the poet who sang

of himself as Hermes' gifts" is Hermodorus; and "the son of Sicelides"

is Asclepiades, referred to under the same name by his great pupil

Theocritus. The names of these forty-eight poets (including Meleager

himself) show that the collection embraced epigrams of all periods

from the earliest times up to his own day. Six belong to the early

period of the lyric poets, ending with the Persian wars; Archilochus,

who flourished about 700 B.C., Sappho and Erinna a century afterwards,

Simonides and Anacreon about 500 B.C., and a little later,

Bacchylides. Five more belong to the fourth century B.C., the period

which begins with the destruction of the Athenian empire and ends with

the establishment of the Macedonian kingdoms of the Diadochi. Of

these, Plato is still within the Athenian period; Hegesippus, Simmias,

Anyte, and Phaedimus, all towards the end of the century, mark the

beginning of the Alexandrian period. Four have completely disappeared

out of the Anthology as we possess it; Melanippides, a celebrated

writer of dithyrambic poetry in the latter half of the fifth century

B.C., of which a few fragments survive, and Euphemus, Parthenis, and

Polycleitus, of whom nothing whatever is known. The remaining thirty-

three poets in Meleager's list all belong to the Alexandrian period,

and bring the series down continuously to Meleager himself.

One of the epigrams in the Anthology of Strato[8] professes to be the

colophon {xoronis} to Meleager's collection; but it is a stupid and

clumsy forgery of an obviously later date, probably by Strato himself,

or some contemporary, and is not worth quoting. The proem to the

Garland is a work of great ingenuity, and contains in single words and

phrases many exquisite criticisms. The phrase used of Sappho has

become proverbial; hardly less true and pointed are those on Erinna,

Callimachus, and Plato. All the flowers are carefully and

appropriately chosen with reference to their poets, and the whole is

done with the light and sure touch of a critic who is also a poet

himself.

A scholiast on the Palatine MS. says that Meleager's Anthology was

arranged in alphabetical order {xata stoikheion}. This seems to mean

alphabetical order of epigrams, not of authors; and the statement is

borne out by some parts of the Palatine and even of the Planudean

Anthologies, where, in spite of the rearrangement under subjects,

traces of alphabetical arrangement among the older epigrams are still

visible. The words of the scholiast imply that there was no further

arrangement by subject. It seems most reasonable to suppose that the

epigrams of each author were placed together; but of this there is no

direct evidence, nor can any such arrangement be certainly inferred

from the state of the existing Anthologies.

The Scholiast, in this same passage, speaks of Meleager's collection

as an {epigrammaton stephanos}, and obviously it consisted in the main

of epigrams according to the ordinary definition. But it is curious

that Meleager himself nowhere uses the word; and from some phrases in

the proem it is difficult to avoid the inference that he included

other kinds of minor poetry as well. Too much stress need not be laid

on the words {umnos} and {aoide}, which in one form or another are

repeatedly used by him; though it is difficult to suppose that "the

hymns of Melanippides", who is known to have been a dithyrambic poet,

can mean not hymns but epigrams.[9] But where Anacreon is mentioned,

his {melisma} and his elegiac pieces are unmistakably distinguished

from each other, and are said to be both included; and this {melisma}

must mean lyric poetry of some kind, probably the very hemiambics

under the name of Anacreon which are extant as an appendix to the

Palatine MS. Meleager's Anthology also pretty certainly included his

own Song of Spring,[10] which is a hexameter poem, though but for the

form of verse it might just come within a loose definition of an

epigram. Whether it included idyllic poems like the Amor Fugitivus of

Moschus[11] it is not possible to determine.

Besides his great Anthology, another, of the same class of contents as

that subsequently made by Strato, is often ascribed to Meleager, an

epigram in Strato's Anthology[12] being regarded as the proem to this

supposed collection. But there is no external authority whatever for

this hypothesis; nor is it necessary to regard this epigram as

anything more than a poem commemorating the boys mentioned in it.

Eros, not Meleager, is in this case the weaver of the garland.

The next compiler of an Anthology, more than a century after Meleager,

was Philippus of Thessalonica. Of this also the proem is

preserved.[13] It purports to be a collection of the epigrammatists

since Meleager, and is dedicated to the Roman patron of the author,

one Camillus. The proem runs thus:

"Having plucked for thee Heliconian flowers, and cut the first-blown

blossoms of famous-forested Pieria, and reaped the ears from modern

pages, I wove a rival garland, to be like those of Meleager; but do

thou, noble Cantillus, who knowest the fame of the older poets, know

likewise the short pieces of the younger. Antipater's corn-ear shall

grace our garland, and Crinagoras like an ivy-cluster; Antiphilus

shall glow like a grape-bunch, Tullius like melilote, Philodemus like

marjoram: and Parmenio myrtle-berries: Antiphanes as a rose: Automedon

ivy, Zonas lilies, Bianor oak, Antigonus olive, and Diodorus violet.

Liken thou Euenus to laurel, and the multitude woven in with these to

what fresh-blown flowers thou wilt."

One sees here the decline of the art from its first exquisiteness.

There is no selection or appropriateness in the names of the flowers

chosen, and the verse is managed baldly and clumsily. Philippus' own

epigrams, of which over seventy are extant, are generally rather dull,

chiefly school exercises, and, in the phrase of Jacobs, /imitatione

magis quam inventione conspicua/. But we owe to him the preservation

of a large mass of work belonging to the Roman period. The date of

Philippus cannot be fixed very precisely. His own epigrams contain no

certain allusion to any date other than the reign of Augustus. Of the

poets named in his proem, Antiphanes, Euenus, Parmenio, and Tullius

have no date determinable from internal evidence. Antigonus has been

sometimes identified with Antigonus of Carystus, the author of the

{Paradokon Sunagoge}, who lived in the third century B.C. under

Ptolemy Philadelphus or Ptolemy Euergetes; but as this Anthology

distinctly professes to be of poets since Meleager, he must be another

author of the same name. Antipater of Thessalonica, Bianor, and

Diodorus are of the Augustan period; Philodemus, Zonas, and probably

Automedon, of the period immediately preceding it. The latest certain

allusion in the poems of Antiphilus is to the enfranchisement of

Rhodes by Nero in A.D. 53.[14] One of the epigrams under the name of

Automedon in the Anthology[15] is on the rhetorician Nicetas, the

teacher of the younger Pliny. But there are at least two poets of the

name, Automedon of Aetolia and Automedon of Cyzicus, and the former,

who is pre-Roman, may be the one included by Philippus. If so, we need

not, with Jacobs, date this collection in the reign of Trajan, at the

beginning of the second century, but may place it with greater

probability half a century earlier, under Nero.

In the reign of Hadrian the grammarian Diogenianus of Heraclea edited

an Anthology of epigrams,[16] but nothing is known of it beyond the

name. The Anthology contains a good deal of work which may be referred

to this period.

The first of the appendices to the Palatine Anthology is the {Paidike

Mousa} of Strato of Sardis. The compiler apologises in a prefatory

note for including it, excusing himself with the line of

Euripides,[17] {e ge sopsron ou diapstharesetai}. It was a new

Anthology of epigrams dealing with this special subject from the

earliest period downwards. As we possess it, Strato's collection

includes thirteen of the poets named in the Garland of Meleager

(including Meleager himself), two of those named in the Garland of

Philippus, and ten other poets, none of them of much mark, and most of

unknown date; the most interesting being Alpheus of Mitylene, who from

the style and contents of his epigrams seems to have lived about the

time of Hadrian, but may possibly be an Augustan poet. Strato is

mentioned by Diogenes Laërtius,[18] who wrote at the beginning of the

third century; and his own epigram on the physician Artemidorus

Capito,[19] who was a contemporary of Hadrian, fixes his approximate

date.

How far we possess Strato's collection in its original form it is

impossible to decide. Jacobs says he cannot attempt to determine

whether Cephalas took it in a lump or made a selection from it, or

whether he kept the order of the epigrams. As they stand they have no

ascertainable principle of arrangement, alphabetical or of author or

of subject. The collection consists of two hundred and fifty-nine

epigrams, of which ninety-four are by Strato himself and sixty by

Meleager. It has either been carelessly formed, or suffered from

interpolation afterwards. Some of the epigrams are foreign to the

subject of the collection. Six are on women;[20] and four of these are

on women whose names end in the diminutive form, Phanion, Callistion,

etc., which suggests the inference that they were inserted at a late

date and by an ignorant transcriber who confused these with masculine

forms. For all the epigrams of Strato's collection the Anthology is

the only source.

In the three hundred years between Strato and Agathias no new

Anthology is known to have been made.

The celebrated Byzantine poet and historian Agathias, son of Mamnonius

of Myrina, came to Constantinople as a young man to study law in the

year 554. In the preface to his History he tells us that he formed a

new collection of recent and contemporary epigrams previously

unpublished,[21] in seven books, entitled {Kuklos}. His proem to the

Cyclus is extant.[22] It consists of forty-six iambics followed by

eighty-seven hexameters, and describes the collection under the

symbolism no longer of a flower-garden, but of a feast to which

different persons bring contributions ({ou stepsanos alla sunagoge}),

a metaphor which is followed out with unrelenting tediousness. The

piece is not worth transcription here. He says he includes his own

epigrams. After a panegyric on the greatness of the empire of

Justinian, and the foreign and domestic peace of his reign, he ends by

describing the contents of the collection. Book I. contains

dedications in the ancient manner, {os proterois makaressin aneimena}:

for Agathias was himself a Christian, and indeed the old religion had

completely died out even before Justinian closed the schools of

Athens. Book II. contains epigrams on statues, pictures, and other

works of art; Book III., sepulchral epigrams; Book IV., epigrams "on

the manifold paths of life, and the unstable scales of fortune,"

corresponding to the section of {Protreptika} in the Palatine

Anthology; Book V., irrisory epigrams; Book VI. amatory epigrams; and

Book VII., convivial epigrams. Agathias, so far as we know, was the

first who made this sort of arrangement under subjects, which, with

modifications, has generally been followed afterwards. His Anthology

is lost; and probably perished soon after that of Cephalas was made.

Constantinus Cephalas, a grammarian unknown except from the Palatine

MS., began again from the beginning. The scholiast to the Garland of

Meleager in that MS., after saying that Meleager's Anthology was

arranged in alphabetical order, goes on as follows:--"but

Constantinus, called Cephalas, broke it up, and distributed it under

different heads, viz., the love-poems separately, and the dedications

and epitaphs, and epideictic pieces, as they are now arranged below in

this book."[23] We must assume that with this rearranged Anthology he

incorporated those of Philippus and Agathias, unless, which is not

probable, we suppose that the Palatine Anthology is one enlarged from

that of Cephalas by some one else completely unknown.

As to the date of Cephalas there is no certain indication. Suidas

apparently quotes from his Anthology; but even were we certain that

these quotations are not made from original sources, his lexicon

contains entries made at different times over a space of several

centuries. A scholium to one of the epigrams[24] of Alcaeus of Messene

speaks of a discussion on it by Cephalas which took place in the

School of the New Church at Constantinople. This New Church was built

by the Emperor Basil I. (reigned 867-876). Probably Cephalas lived in

the reign of Constantine VII. Porphyrogenitus (911-959), who had a

passion for art and literature, and is known to have ordered the

compilation of books of excerpts. Gibbon gives an account of the

revival of learning which took place under his influence, and of the

relations of his Court with that of the Western Empire of Otto the

Great.

The arrangement in the Anthology of Cephalas is founded on that of

Agathias. But alongside of the arrangement under subjects we

frequently find strings of epigrams by the same author with no

particular connection in subject, which are obviously transcribed

directly from a collected edition of his poems.

Maximus Planudes, theologian, grammarian, and rhetorician, lived in

the early part of the fourteenth century; in 1327 he was appointed

ambassador to the Venetian Republic by Andronicus II. Among his works

were translations into Greek of Augustine's City of God and Caesar's

Gallic War. The restored Greek Empire of the Palaeologi was then fast

dropping to pieces. The Genoese colony of Pera usurped the trade of

Constantinople and acted as an independent state; and it brings us

very near the modern world to remember that while Planudes was the

contemporary of Petrarch and Doria, Andronicus III., the grandson and

successor of Andronicus II., was married, as a suitable match, to

Agnes of Brunswick, and again after her death to Anne of Savoy.

Planudes made a new Anthology in seven books, founded on that of

Cephalas, but with many alterations and omissions. Each book is

divided into chapters which are arranged alphabetically by subject,

with the exception of the seventh book, consisting of amatory

epigrams, which is not subdivided. In a prefatory note to this book he

says he has omitted all indecent or unseemly epigrams, {polla en to

antigrapso onta}. This {antograpso} was the Anthology of Cephalas. The

contents of the different books are as follows:

Book I.--{Epideiktika}, in ninety-one chapters; from the {Epideiktika}

of Cephalas, with additions from his {Anathematika} and {Protreptika},

and twelve new epigrams on statues.

Book II.--{Skoptika}, in fifty-three chapters; from the {Sumpotika kai

Skoptika} and the {Mousa Stratonos} of Cephalas, with six new

epigrams.

Book III.--{Epitumbia}, in thirty-two chapters; from the {Epitumbia}

of Cephalas, which are often transcribed in the original order, with

thirteen new epigrams.

Book IV.--Epigrams on monuments, statues, animals, and places, in

thirty-three chapters; some from the {Epideiktika} of Cephalas, but

for the greater part new.

Book V.--Christodorus' description of the statues in the gymnasium

called Zeuxippus, and a collection of epigrams in the Hippodrome at

Constantinople; from appendices to the Anthology of Cephalas.

Book VI.--{Anathematika}, in twenty-seven chapters; from the

{Anathematika} of Cephalas, with four new epigrams.

Book VII.--{Erotika}; from the {Erotika} of Cephalas, with twenty-six

new epigrams.

Obviously then the Anthology of Planudes was almost wholly taken from

that of Cephalas, with the exception of epigrams on works of art,

which are conspicuously absent from the earlier collection as we

possess it. As to these there is only one conclusion. It is impossible

to account for Cephalas having deliberately omitted this class of

epigrams; it is impossible to account for their re-appearance in

Planudes, except on the supposition that we have lost a section of the

earlier Anthology which included them. The Planudean Anthology

contains in all three hundred and ninety-seven epigrams, which are not

in the Palatine MS. of Cephalas. It is in these that its principal

value lies. The vitiated taste of the period selected later and worse

in preference to earlier and better epigrams; the compilation was made

carelessly and, it would seem, hurriedly, the earlier part of the

sections of Cephalas being largely transcribed and the latter part

much less fully, as though the editor had been pressed for time or

lost interest in the work as he went on. Not only so, but he mutilated

the text freely, and made sweeping conjectural restorations where it

was imperfect. The discrepancies too in the authorship assigned to

epigrams are so frequent and so striking that they can only be

explained by great carelessness in transcription; especially as

internal evidence where it can be applied almost uniformly supports

the headings of the Palatine Anthology.

Such as it was, however, the Anthology of Planudes displaced that of

Cephalas almost at once, and remained the only MS. source of the

anthology until the seventeenth century. The other entirely

disappeared, unless a copy of it was the manuscript belonging to

Angelo Colloti, seen and mentioned by the Roman scholar and

antiquarian Fulvio Orsini (b. 1529, d. 1600) about the middle of the

sixteenth century, and then again lost to view. The Planudean

Anthology was first printed at Florence in 1484 by the Greek scholar,

Janus Lascaris, from a good MS. It continued to be reprinted from time

to time, the last edition being the five sumptuous quarto volumes

issued from the press of Wild and Altheer at Utrecht, 1795-1822.

In the winter of 1606-7, Salmasius, then a boy of eighteen but already

an accomplished scholar, discovered a manuscript of the Anthology of

Cephalas in the library of the Counts Palatine at Heidelberg. He

copied from it the epigrams hitherto unknown, and these began to be

circulated in manuscript under the name of the Anthologia Inedita. The

intention he repeatedly expressed of editing the whole work was never

carried into effect. In 1623, on the capture of Heidelberg by the

Archduke Maximilian of Bavaria in the Thirty Years' War, this with

many other MSS. and books was sent by him to Rome as a present to Pope

Gregory XV., and was placed in the Vatican Library. It remained there

till it was taken to Paris by order of the French Directory in 1797,

and was restored to the Palatine Library after the end of the war.

The description of this celebrated manuscript, the Codex Palatinus or

Vaticanus, as it has been named from the different places of its

abode, is as follows: it is a long quarto, on parchment, of 710 pages,

together with a page of contents and three other pages glued on at the

beginning. There are three hands in it. The table of contents and

pages 1-452 and 645-704 in the body of the MS. are in a hand of the

eleventh century; the middle of the MS., pages 453-644, is in a later

hand; and a third, later than both, has written the last six pages and

the three odd pages at the beginning, has added a few epigrams in

blank spaces, and has made corrections throughout the MS.

The index, which is of great importance towards the history not only

of the MS. but of the Anthology generally, runs as follows:--

{Tade enestin en tede te biblo ton epigrammaton

A. Nonnou poirtou Panopolitou ekphrasis tou kata Ioannen agiou

euaggeliou.

B. Paulou poirtou selantiariou (sic) uiou Kurou ekphrasis eis ten

megalen ekklesian ete ten agian Sophian.

G. Sullogai epigrammaton Khristianikon eis te naous kai eikonas kai

eis diaphora anathemata.

D. Khristodorou poietou Thebaiou ekphrasis ton agalmaton ton eis to

demosion gumnasion tou epikaloumenou Zeuxippou.

E. Meleagou poietou Palaistinou stephanos diaphoron epigrammaton.

S. Philippou poietou Thessalonikeos stephanos omoios diaphoron

epigrammaton.

Z. Agathiou skholastikou Asianou Murenaiou sulloge neon epigrammaton

ektethenton en Konstantinoupolei pros Theodoron Dekouriona. esti

de e taxis ton epigrammaton egoun diairesis outos.

a. prote men e ton Khristianon.

b. deutera de e ta Khristodorou periekhousa tou Thebaiou.

g. trete (sic) de arkhen men ekhousa ten ton erotikon epigrammaton

upothesin.

d. e ton anathematikon.

e. pempte e ton epitumbion.

s. e ton epideiktikon.

z. ebdome e ton pretreptikon.

e. e ton skoptikon.

th. ebdome e ton protreptikon.

i. diaphoron metron diaphora epigrammata.

ia. arithmetika kai grepha summikta.

ib. Ioannou grammatikou Gazes ekphrasis tou kosmikou pinakos tou en

kheimerio loutro.

ig. Surigx Theokritou kai pteruges Simmiou Dosiada bomos Besantinou

oon kai pelekus.

id. Anakreontos Teiou Sumposiaka emiambia kai Anakreontia kai

trimetra.

ie. Tou agiou Gregoriou tou theologou ek ton epon eklogai diaphorai

en ois kai ta Arethou kai Anastasiou kai Ignatiou kai

Konstantinou kai Theophanous keintai epigrammata.}

This index must have been transcribed from the index of an earlier MS.

It differs from the actual contents of the MS. in the following

respects:--

The hexameter paraphrase of S. John's Gospel by Nonnus is not in the

MS., having perhaps been torn off from the beginning of it.

After the description of S. Sophia by Paulus Silentiarius, follow in

the MS. select poems of S. Gregorius.

After the description by Christodorus of the statues in the gymnasium

of Zeuxippus follows a collection of nineteen epigrams inscribed below

carved reliefs in the temple of Apollonis, mother of Attalus and

Eumenes kings of Pergamus, at Cyzicus.

After the proem to the Anthology of Agathias follows another epigram

of his, apparently the colophon to his collection.

The book of Christian epigrams and that of poems by Christodorus of

Thebes are wanting in the MS.

Between the /Sepulcralia/ and /Epideictica/ is inserted a collection

of 254 epigrams by S. Gregorius.

John of Gaza's description of the Mappa Mundi in the winter baths is

wanting in the MS.

After the miscellaneous Byzantine epigrams, which form the last entry

in the index, is a collection of epigrams in the Hippodrome at

Constantinople.

The Palatine MS. then is a copy from another lost MS. And the lost MS.

itself was not the archetype of Cephalas. From a prefatory note to the

/Dedicatoria/, taken in connection with the three iambic lines

prefixed to the /Amatoria/, it is obvious that the /Amatoria/ formed

the first section of the Anthology of Cephalas, preceded, no doubt, by

the three proems of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias as prefatory

matter. The first four headings in the index, therefore, represent

matter subsequently added. Whether all the small appendices at the end

of the MS. were added to the Anthology by Cephalas or by a later hand

it is not possible to determine. With or without these appendices, the

work of Cephalas consisted of six sections of {Erotika},

{Anathematika}, {Epitumbia}, {Epideiktica}, {Protreptika} and

{Eumpotika kai Skoptika}, with the {Mousa Stratonos}, and probably, as

we have already seen, a lost section containing epigrams on works of

art. At the beginning of the sepulchral epigrams there is a marginal

note in the MS., in the corrector's hand, speaking of Cephalas as then

dead.[25] Another note, added by the same hand on the margin of vii.

432, says that our MS. had been collated with another belonging to one

Michael Magister, which was copied by him with his own hand from the

book of Cephalas.

The extracts made by Salmasius remained for long the only source

accessible to scholars for the contents of the Palatine Anthology.

Jacobs, when re-editing Brunck's /Analecta/, obtained a copy of the

MS., then in the Vatican library, from Uhden, the Prussian ambassador

at Rome; and from another copy, afterwards made at his instance by

Spaletti, he at last edited the Anthology in its complete form.

----------

[1] Cf. especially Hdt. v. 59, 60, 77; Thuc. i. 132, vi. 54, 59.

[2] Suid. s.v. {PHilokhoros}.

[3] Athen. x. 436 D., 442 E.

[4] Athen. xiii. 591 C, 594 D.

[5] Ibid. x. 454 F. The date of Neoptolemus is uncertain; he probably

lived in the second century B.C.

[6] Anth. Pol. vii. 428; Cic. Or. iii. 194, Pis. 68-70.

[7] Ibid. iv. 1.

[8] Anth. Pal. xii. 257.

[9] Melanippides, however, also wrote epigrams according to Suidas,

s.v., and the phrase of Meleager may mean "the epigrams of this

poet who was celebrated as a hymn-writer".

[10] Anth. Pal. ix. 363.

[11] Ibid. ix. 440.

[12] Ibid. xii. 256.

[13] Anth. Pal. iv. 2.

[14] Anth. Pal. ix. 178.

[15] Ibid. x. 23.

[16] Suidas s.v. {Diogenianos}.

[17] Bacch. 318.

[18] v. 61.

[19] Anth. Pal. xi. 117.

[20] Anth. Pal. xvi. 53, 82, 114, 131, 147, 173.

[21] Agathias, Hist. i. 1: {ton epigrammaton ta artigene kai neotera

oialanthanonti eti kai khuden outosi par eniois

upophithurizomena}. Cf. also Suidas, s.v. {Agathias}.

[22] Anth. Pal. iv. 3.

[23] Schol. on Anth. Pal. iv. 1.

[24] Anth. Pal. vii. 429.

[25] {Konstantinos o Kephalas o makarios kai aeimnestos kai

tripothetos anthrepos}.

V

When any selection of minor poetry is made, the principle of

arrangement is one of the first difficulties. In dealing with the

Greek epigram, the matter before us, as has been said already,

consists of between five and six thousand pieces, all in the same

metre, and varying in length from two to twenty-eight lines,[1] but

rarely exceeding twelve. No principle of arrangement can therefore be

based on the form of the poems. There are three other plans possible;

a simply arbitrary order, an arrangement by authorship, or an

arrangement by subject. The first, if we believe the note in the

Palatine MS. already quoted, was adopted by Meleager in the

alphabetical arrangement of his Garland; but beyond the uncommon

variety it must give to the reader, it seems to have little to

recommend it. The Anthologies of Cephalas and Planudes are both

arranged by subject, but with considerable differences. The former, if

we omit the unimportant sections and the Christian epigrams, consists

of seven large sections in the following order:

(1) {Erotika}, amatory pieces. This heading requires no comment.

(2) {Anathematika}, dedicatory pieces, consisting of votive prayers

and dedications proper.

(3) {Epitumbia}, sepulchral pieces: consisting partly of epitaphs real

or imaginary, partly of epigrams on death or on dead persons in a

larger scope. Thus it includes the epigram on the Lacedaemonian mother

who killed her son for returning alive from an unsuccessful battle;[2]

that celebrating the magnificence of the tomb of Semiramis;[3] that

questioning the story as to the leap of Empedocles into Etna;[4] and a

large number which might equally well come under the next head, being

eulogies on celebrated authors and artists.

(4) {Epideiktika}, epigrams written as {epideixeis}, poetical

exercises or show-pieces. This section is naturally the longest and

much the most miscellaneous. There is indeed hardly any epigram which

could not be included in it. Remarkable objects in nature or art,

striking events, actual or imaginary, of present and past times, moral

sentences, and criticisms on particular persons and things or on life

generally; descriptive pieces; stories told in verse; imaginary

speeches of celebrated persons on different occasions, with such

titles as "what Philomela would say to Procne," "what Ulysses would

say when he landed in Ithaca"; inscriptions for houses, baths,

gardens, temples, pictures, statues, gems, clocks, cups: such are

among the contents, though not exhausting them.

(5) {Protreptika}, hortatory pieces; the "criticism of life" in the

direct sense.

(6) {Sumpotika kai Skoptika}, convivial and humorous epigrams.

(7) The {Mousa paidike Stratonos} already spoken of. Along with these,

as we have seen, there was in all probability an eighth section now

lost, containing epigrams on works of art.

Within each of these sections, the principle of arrangement, where it

exists at all, is very loose; and either the compilation was

carelessly made at first, or it has been considerably disordered in

transcription. Sometimes a number of epigrams by the same author

succeed one another, as though copied directly from a collection where

each author's work was placed separately; sometimes, on the other

hand, a number on the same subject by authors of different periods

come together.[5] Epigrams occasionally are put under wrong headings.

For example, a dedication by Leonidas of Alexandria is followed in the

/Dedicatoria/ by another epigram of his on Oedipus;[6] an imaginary

epitaph on Hesiod in the /Sepulcralia/ by one on the legendary contest

between Hesiod and Homer;[7] and the lovely fragment of pastoral on

Love keeping Thyrsis' sheep[8] comes oddly in among epitaphs. The

epideictic section contains a number of epigrams which would be more

properly placed in one or another of all the rest of the sections; and

the /Musa Stratonis/ has several which happily in no way belong to it.

There is no doubt a certain charm to the very confusion of the order,

which gives great variety and unexpectedness; but for practical

purposes a more accurate classification is desirable.

The Anthology of Planudes attempts, in a somewhat crude form, to

supply this. Each of the six books, with the exception of the

{Erotika}, which remain as is in the Palatine Anthology, is subdivided

into chapters according to subject, the chapters being arranged

alphabetically by headings. Thus the list of chapters in Book I.

begins, {eis agonas}, {eis ampelon}, {eis anathemata}, {eis

anaperous}, and ends {eis phronesin}, {eis phrontidas}, {eis khronon},

{eis oras}.

On the other hand, Brunck, in his /Analecta/, the arrangement of which

is followed by Jacobs in the earlier of his two great works, recast

the whole scheme, placing all epigrams by the same author together,

with those of unknown authorship at the end. This method presents

definite advantages when the matter in hand is a complete collection

of the works of the epigrammatists. With these smaller, as with the

more important works of literature, it is still true that a poet is

his own best commentator, and that by a complete single view of all

his pieces we are able to understand each one of them better. A

counter-argument is the large mass of {adespota} thus left in a heap

at the end. In Jacobs there are upwards of 750 of these, most of them

not assignable to any certain date; and they have to be arranged

roughly by subject. Another is the fact that a difficulty still

remains as to the arrangement of the authors. Of many of the minor

epigrammatists we know absolutely nothing from external sources; and

it is often impossible to determine from internal evidence the period,

even within several centuries, at which an epigram was written, so

little did the style and diction alter between the early Alexandrian

and the late Byzantine period. Still the advantages are too great to

be outweighed by these considerations.

But in a selection, an Anthology of the Anthology, the reasons for

such an arrangement no longer exist, and some sort of arrangement by

subject is plainly demanded. It would be possible to follow the old

divisions of the Palatine Anthology with little change but for the

epideictic section. This is not a natural division, and is not

satisfactory in its results. It did not therefore seem worthwhile to

adhere in other respects to the old classification except where it was

convenient; and by a new and somewhat more detailed division, it has

been attempted to give a closer unity to each section, and to make the

whole of them illustrate progressively the aspect of the ancient

world. Sections I., II., and VI. of the Palatine arrangement just

given are retained, under the headings of Love, Prayers and

Dedications, and the Human Comedy. It proved convenient to break up

Section III., that of sepulchral epigrams, which would otherwise have

been much the largest of the divisions, into two sections, one of

epitaphs proper, the other dealing with death more generally. A

limited selection from Section VII. has been retained under a separate

heading, Beauty. Section V., with additions from many other sources,

was the basis of a division dealing with the Criticism of Life; while

Section IV., together with what was not already classed, fell

conveniently under five heads: Nature, and in antithesis to it, Art

and Literature; Family Life; and the ethical view of things under the

double aspect of Religion on the one hand, and on the other, the blind

and vast forces of Fate and Change.

----------

[1] Single lines are excluded by the definition; Anth. Pal. ix. 482

appears to be the longest piece in the Anthology which can

properly be called an epigram.

[2] Anth. Pal. vii. 433.

[3] Ibid. vii. 748.

[4] Ibid. vii. 124.

[5] Cf. especially Anth. Pal. vi. 179-187; ix. 713-742.

[6] Anth. Pal. vi. 322, 323.

[7] Ibid. vii. 52, 53.

[8] Ibid. vii. 703.

VI

The literary treatment of the passion of love is one of the matters in

which the ancient stands furthest apart from the modern world. Perhaps

the result of love in human lives differs but little from one age to

another; but the form in which it is expressed (which is all that

literature has to do with) was altered in Western Europe in the middle

ages, and ever since then we have spoken a different language. And the

subject is one in which the feeling is so inextricably mixed up with

the expression that a new language practically means a new actual

world of things. Of nothing is it so true that emotion is created by

expression. The enormous volume of expression developed in modern

times by a few great poets and a countless number of prose writers has

reacted upon men and women; so certain is it that thought follows

language, and life copies art. And so here more than elsewhere, though

the rule applies to the whole sphere of human thought and action, we

have to expect in Greek literature to find much latent and implicit

which since then has become patent and prominent; much intricate

psychology not yet evolved; much--as is the truth of everything Greek

--stated so simply and directly, that we, accustomed as we are to more

complex and highly organised methods of expression, cannot without

some difficulty connect it with actual life, or see its permanent

truth. Yet to do so is just the value of studying Greek; for the more

simple the forms or ideas of life are, the better are we able to put

them in relation with one another, and so to unify life. And this

unity is the end which all human thought pursues.

Greek literature itself however may in this matter be historically

subdivided. In its course we can fix landmarks, and trace the entrance

and working of one and another fresh element. The Homeric world, the

noblest and the simplest ever conceived on earth; the period of the

great lyric poets; that of the dramatists, philosophers and

historians, which may be called the Athenian period; the hardly less

extraordinary ages that followed, when Greek life and language

overspread and absorbed the whole Mediterranean world, mingling with

East and West alike, making a common meeting-place for the Jew and the

Celt, the Arab and the Roman; these four periods, though they have a

unity in the fact that they are all Greek, are yet separated in other

ways by intervals as great as those which divide Virgil from Dante, or

Chaucer from Milton.

In the Iliad and Odyssey little is said about love directly; and yet

it is not to be forgotten that the moving force of the Trojan war was

the beauty of Helen, and the central interest of the return of

Odysseus is the passionate fidelity of Penelope.[1] Yet more than

this; when the poet has to speak of the matter, he never fails to rise

to the occasion in a way that even now we can see to be unsurpassable.

The Achilles of the Iliad may speak scornfully of Briseïs, as

insufficient cause to quarrel on;[2] the silver-footed goddess, set

above all human longings, regards the love of men and women from her

icy heights with a light passionless contempt.[3] But in the very

culminating point of the death-struggle between Achilles and Hector,

it is from the whispered talk of lovers that the poet fetches the

utmost touch of beauty and terror;[4] and it is in speaking to the

sweetest and noblest of all the women of poetry that Odysseus says the

final word that has yet been said of married happiness.[5]

In this heroic period love is only spoken of incidentally and

allusively. The direct poetry of passion belongs to the next period,

only known to us now by scanty fragments, "the spring-time of

song,"[6] the period of the great lyric poets of the sixth and seventh

centuries B.C. There human passion and emotion had direct expression,

and that, we can judge from what is left to us, the fullest and most

delicate possible. Greek life then must have been more beautiful than

at any other time; and the Greek language, much as it afterwards

gained in depth and capacity of expressing abstract thought, has never

again the same freshness, as though steeped in dew and morning

sunlight. Sappho alone, that unique instance of literature where from

a few hundred fragmentary lines we know certainly that we are in face

of one of the great poets of the world, expressed the passion of love

in a way which makes the language of all other poets grow pallid: /ad

quod cum iungerent purpuras suas, cineris specie decolorari videbantur

ceterae divini comparatione fulgoris/.[7]

{eraman men ego sethen, Atthi, palai pota--}[8]

such simple words that have all sadness in their lingering cadences;

{Oion to glukumalon ereuthetai--

Er eti parthenias epiballomai;

Ou gar en atera pais, o gambre, toiauta--}[9]

the poetry of pure passion has never reached further than this.

But with the vast development of Greek thought and art in the fifth

century B.C., there seems to have come somehow a stiffening of Greek

life; the one overwhelming interest of the City absorbing individual

passion and emotion, as the interest of logic and metaphysics absorbed

history and poetry. The age of Thucydides and Antipho is not one in

which the emotions have a change; and at Athens especially--of other

cities we can only speak from exceedingly imperfect knowledge, but

just at this period Athens means Greece--the relations between men and

women are even under Pericles beginning to be vulgarised. In the great

dramatic poets love enters either as a subsidiary motive somewhat

severely and conventionally treated, as in the Antigone of Sophocles,

or, as in the Phaedra and Medea of Euripides, as part of a general

study of psychology. It would be foolish to attempt to defend the

address of the chorus in the Antigone to Eros,[10] if regarded as the

language of passion; and even if regarded as the language of

criticism, it is undeniably frigid. Contrasted with the great chorus

in the same play,[11] where Sophocles is dealing with a subject that

he really cares about, it sounds almost artificial. And in Euripides,

psychology occupies the whole of the interest that is not already

preoccupied by logic and rhetoric; these were the arts of life, and

with these serious writing dealt; with the heroism of Macaria, even

with the devotion of Alcestis, personal passion has but little to do.

With the immense expansion of the Greek world that followed the

political extinction of Greece Proper, there came a relaxation of this

tension. Feeling grew humaner; social and family life reassumed their

real importance; and gradually there grew up a thing till then unknown

in the world, and one the history of which yet remains to be written,

the romantic spirit. Pastoral poetry, with its passionate sense of

beauty in nature, reacted on the sense of beauty in simple human life.

The Idyls of Theocritus are full of a new freshness of feeling: {epei

k esores tas parthenos oia gelanti}[12]--this is as alien from the

Athenian spirit as it approaches the feeling of a medieval romance-

writer: and in the Pharmaceutriae pure passion, but passion softened

into exquisite forms, is once more predominant.[13] It is in this age

then that we naturally find the most perfect examples of the epigram

of love. In the lyric period the epigram was still mainly confined to

its stricter sphere, that of inscriptions for tombs and dedicated

offerings: in the great Athenian age the direct treatment of love was

almost in abeyance. Just on the edge of this last period, as is usual

in a time of transition, there are exquisite premonitions of the new

art. The lovely hexameter fragment[14] preserved in the Anthology

under the name of Plato, and not unworthy of so great a parentage,

anticipates the manner and the cadences of Theocritus; and one or two

of the amatory epigrams that are probably Plato's might be Meleager's,

but for the severe perfection of language that died with Greek

freedom. But it is in the Alexandrian period that the epigram of love

flowers out; and it is at the end of that period, where the Greek

spirit was touched by Oriental passion, that it culminates in

Meleager.

We possess about a hundred amatory epigrams by this poet. Inferior

perhaps in clearness of outline and depth of insight to those of the

Alexandrian poet Asclepiades, they are unequalled in the width of

range, the profusion of imagination, the subtlety of emotion with

which they sound the whole lyre of passion. Meleager was born in a

Syrian town and educated at Tyre in the last age of the Seleucid

empire; and though he writes Greek with perfect mastery, it becomes in

his hands almost a new language, full of dreams, at once more languid

and more passionate. It was the fashion among Alexandrian poets to

experiment in language; and Callimachus had in this way brought the

epigram to the most elaborate jewel-finish; but in the work of

Callimachus and his contemporaries the pure Greek tradition still

survives. In Meleager, the touch of Asiatic blood creates a new type,

delicate, exotic, fantastic. Art is no longer restrained and severe.

The exquisite austerity of Greek poetry did not outlive the greatness

of Athens; its perfect clearness of outline still survived in

Theocritus; here both are gone. The atmosphere is loaded with a steam

of perfumes, and with still unimpaired ease and perfection of hand

there has come in a strain of the quality which of all qualities is

the most remote from the Greek spirit, mysticism. Some of Meleager's

epigrams are direct and simple, even to coarseness; but in all the

best and most characteristic there is this vital difference from

purely Greek art, that love has become a religion; the spirit of the

East has touched them. It is this that makes Meleager so curiously

akin to the medieval poets. Many of his turns of thought, many even of

his actual expressions, have the closest parallel in poets of the

fourteenth century who had never read a line of his work nor heard of

his name. As in them, the religion of love is reduced to a theology;

no subtlety, no fluctuation of fancy or passion is left unregistered,

alike in their lighter and their graver moods. Sometimes the feeling

is buried in masses of conceits, sometimes it is eagerly passionate,

but even then always with an imaginative and florid passion, never

directly as Sappho or Catullus is direct. Love appears in a hundred

shapes amidst a shower of fantastic titles and attributes. Out of all

the epithets that Meleager coins for him, one, set in a line of

hauntingly liquid and languid rhythm, "delicate-sandalled,"[15] gives

the key-note to the rest. Or again, he often calls him {glukupikros},

"bittersweet";[16] at first he is like wine mingled with honey for

sweetness, but as he grows and becomes more tyrannous, his honey

scorches and stings; and the lover, "set on fire and drenched to

swooning with his ointments," drinks from a deeper cup and mingles his

wine with burning tears.[17] Love the Reveller goes masking with the

lover through stormy winter nights;[18] Love the Ball-player tosses

hearts for balls in his hands;[19] Love the Runaway lies hidden in a

lady's eyes;[20] Love the Healer soothes with a touch the wound that

his own dart has made;[21] Love the Artist sets his signature beneath

the soul which he has created;[22] Love the Helmsman steers the soul,

like a winged boat, over the perilous seas of desire;[23] Love the

Child, playing idly with his dice at sundawn, throws lightly for human

lives.[24] Now he is a winged boy with childish bow and quiver, swift

of laughter and speech and tears;[25] now a fierce god with flaming

arrows, before whom life wastes away like wax in the fire, Love the

terrible, Love the slayer of men.[26] The air all round him is heavy

with the scent of flowers and ointments; violets and myrtle, narcissus

and lilies, are woven into his garlands, and the rose, "lover-loving"

as Meleager repeatedly calls it in one of his curious new compound

epithets,[27] is perpetually about him, and rains its petals over the

banqueting-table and the myrrh-drenched doorway.[28] For a moment

Meleager can be piercingly simple; and then the fantastic mood comes

over him again, and emotion dissolves in a mist of metaphors. But even

when he is most fantastic the unfailing beauty of his rhythms and

grace of his language remind us that we are still in the presence of a

real art.

The pattern set by Meleager was followed by later poets; and little

more would remain to say were it not necessary to notice the brief

renascence of amatory poetry in the sixth century. The poets of that

period take a high place in the second rank; and one, Paulus

Silentiarius, has a special interest among them as being at once the

most antique in his workmanship and the most modern in his sentiment.

One of his epigrams is like an early poem of Shakespeare's;[29]

another has in a singular degree the manner and movement of a sonnet

by Rossetti.[30] This group of epigrammatists brought back a phantom

of freshness into the old forms; once more the epigram becomes full of

pretty rhythms and fancies, but they are now more artificial; set

beside work of the best period they come out clumsy and heavy.

Language is no longer vivid and natural; the colour is a little

dimmed, the tone a little forced. As the painter's art had disappeared

into that of the worker in mosaic, so the language of poetry was no

longer a living stream, but a treasury of glittering words. Verse-

writers studied it carefully and used it cleverly, but never could

make up for the want of free movement of hand by any laborious

minuteness of tessellation. Yet if removed from the side of their

great models they are graceful enough, with a prettiness that recalls

and probably in many cases is copied from the novelists of the fourth

century; and sometimes it is only a touch of the diffuseness

inseparable from all Byzantine writing that separates their work in

quality from that of an earlier period.

After Justinian the art practically died out. The pedantic rigour of

Byzantine scholarship was little favourable to the poetry of emotion,

and the spoken language had now fallen so far apart from the literary

idiom that only scholars were capable of writing in the old classical

forms. The popular love-poetry, if it existed, has perished and left

no traces; henceforth, for the five centuries that elapsed till the

birth of Provençal and Italian poetry, love lay voiceless, as though

entranced and entombed.

----------

[1] Cf. Il. iii. 156; Anth. Pal. ix. 166.

[2] Il. i. 298.

[3] Il. xxiv. 130.

[4] Il. xxii. 126-8.

[5] Od. vi. 185.

[6] {ear umnon}, Anth. Pal. vii. 12.

[7] Vopisc. Aurel. c. 29.

[8] Frag. 33 Bergk.

[9] Fragg. 93, 102, 106 Bergk.

[10] ll. 781, foll.

[11] ll. 332, foll.

[12] Theocr. i. 85.

[13] ll. 105-110 of this poem set beside Sappho, Fr. ii. ll. 9-16,

Bergk, are a perfect example of the pastoral in contrast with the

lyrical treatment.

[14] App. Plan. 210.

[15] Anth. Pal. xii. 158, {soi me, Theokleis, abropedilos Eros gumnon

upestoresen}.

[16] Ibid. xii. 109; cf. v. 163, 172; xii. 154.

[17] Ibid. xii. 132, 164.

[18] Ibid. xii. 167.

[19] Ibid. v. 214.

[20] Ibid. v. 177.

[21] Ibid. v. 225.

[22] Ibid. v. 155.

[23] Ibid. xii. 157.

[24] Anth. Pal. xii. 47.

[25] Ibid. v. 177.

[26] Ibid. v. 176, 180; xii. 72.

[27] Ibid. v. 136, 147.

[28] Ibid. v. 147, 198.

[29] Ibid. v. 241; cf. Passionate Pilgrim, xiv., xv.

[30] App. Plan. 278.

VII

Closely connected with the passion of love as conceived by Greek

writers is a subject which continually meets us in Greek literature,

and which fills so large a part of the Anthology that it can hardly be

passed over without notice. The few epigrams selected from the

Anthology of Strato and included in this collection under the heading

of Beauty are not of course a representative selection. Of the great

mass of those epigrams no selection is possible or desirable. They

belong to that side of Greek life which is akin to the Oriental world,

and remote and even revolting to the western mind. And on this subject

the common moral sense of civilised mankind has pronounced a judgment

which requires no justification as it allows of no appeal.

But indeed the whole conception of Eros the boy, familiar as it sounds

to us from the long continued convention of literature, is, if we

think of its origin or meaning, quite alien from our own habit of life

and thought. Even in the middle ages it cohered but ill with the

literary view of the relations between men and women in poetry and

romance; hardly, except where it is raised into a higher sphere by the

associations of religion, as in the friezes of Donatello, is it quite

natural, and now, apart from what remains of these same associations,

the natural basis of the conception is wholly obsolete. Since the

fashion of squires and pages, inherited from the feudal system, ceased

with the decay of the Renaissance, there has been nothing in modern

life which even remotely suggests it. We still--such is the strength

of tradition in art--speak of Love under the old types, and represent

him under the image of a winged boy; but the whole condition of

society in which this type grew up has disappeared and left the

symbolism all but meaningless to the ordinary mind. In Greece it was

otherwise. Side by side with the unchanging passions and affections of

all mankind there was then a feeling, half conventional, and yet none

the less of vital importance to thought and conduct, which elevated

the mere physical charm of human youth into an object of almost divine

worship. Beauty was the special gift of the gods, perhaps their

choicest one; and not only so, but it was a passport to their favour.

Common life in the open air, and above all the importance of the

gymnasia, developed great perfection of bodily form and kept it

constantly before all men's eyes. Art lavished all it knew on the

reproduction of the forms of youthful beauty. Apart from the real

feeling, the worship of this beauty became an overpowering fashion. To

all this there must be added a fact of no less importance in

historical Greece, the seclusion of women. Not that this ever existed

in the Oriental sense; but, with much freedom and simplicity of

relations inside the family, the share which women had in the public

and external life of the city, at a time when the city meant so much,

was comparatively slight. The greater freedom of women in Homer makes

the world of the Iliad and Odyssey really more modern, more akin to

our own, than that of the later poets. The girl in Theocritus, "with

spring in her eyes,"[1] comes upon us as we read the Idyls almost like

a modernism. It is in the fair shepherd boy, Daphnis or Thyrsis, that

Greek pastoral finds its most obvious, one might almost say its most

natural inspiration.

Much of what is most perplexing in the difference in this respect

between Greek and western art has light thrown on it, if we think of

the importance which angels have in medieval painting. Their

invention, if one may call it so, was one of the very highest moment

in art. Those lovely creations, so precisely drawn up to a certain

point, so elusive beyond it, raised the feeling for pure beauty into a

wholly ideal plane. The deepest longings of men were satisfied by the

contemplation of a paradise in which we should be even as they. In

that mystical portraiture of the invisible world an answer--perhaps

the only answer--was found to the demand for an ideal of beauty. That

remarkable saying preserved by S. Clement, of a kingdom in which "the

two shall be one, and the male with the female neither male nor

female,"[2] might form the text for a chapter of no small importance

in human history. The Greek lucidity, which made all mysticism

impossible in their art as it was alien from their life, did not do

away with this imperious demand; and their cult of beauty was the

issue of their attempt, imperfect indeed at best and at worst

disastrous, to reunite the fragments of the human ideal.[3]

In much of this poetry too we are in the conventional world of

pastoral; and pastoral, it must be repeated, does not concern itself

with real life. The amount of latitude in literary expression varies

no doubt with the prevalent popular morality of the period. But it

would lead to infinite confusion to think of the poetry as a

translation of conduct. A truer picture of Greek life is happily given

us in those epigrams which deal with the material that history passes

over and ideal poetry, at least in Greek literature, barely touches

upon, the life of simple human relations from day to day within the

circle of the family.

----------

[1] {ear oroosa Nukheia}, Theocr. xiii. 42.

[2] Clem. Rom. II. 12: {eperotetheis autos o Kurios upo tinos pote

exei autou e basileia, eipen, otan estai ta duo en kai to exo os

to eso kai to arsen meta tes theleias oute arsen oute thelu}. It

is also quoted in almost the same words by Clem. Alex., Strom.

xiii. 92, as from "the Gospel according to the Egyptians."

[3] Cf. Plato, Sympos. 191, 192.

VIII

Scattered over the sections of the Anthology are a number of epigrams

touching on this life, which are the more valuable to us, because it

is just this side of the ancient world of which the mass of Greek

literature affords a very imperfect view. In Homer indeed this is not

the case; but in the Athenian period the dramatists and historians

give little information, if we accept the highly idealised burlesque

of the Aristophanic Comedy. Of the New Comedy too little is preserved

to be of much use, and even in it the whole atmosphere was very

conventional. The Greek novel did not come into existence till too

late; and, when it came, it took the form of romance, concerning

itself more with the elaboration of sentiment and the excitement of

adventure than with the portraiture of real manners and actual

surroundings. For any detailed picture of common life, like that which

would be given of our own day to future periods by the domestic novel,

we look to ancient literature in vain. Thus, when we are admitted by a

fortunate chance into the intimacy of private life, as we are by some

of the works of Xenophon and Plutarch or by the letters of the younger

Pliny, the charm of the picture is all the greater: and so it is with

the epigrams that record birthdays and bridals, the toys of children,

the concord of quiet homes. We see the house of the good man,[1] an

abiding rest from the labours of a busy life, bountiful to all,

masters and servants, who dwell under its shelter, and extending a

large hospitality to the friend and the stranger. One generation after

another grows up in it under all good and gracious influences; a

special providence, under the symbolic forms of Cypris Urania or

Artemis the Giver of Light, holds the house in keeping, and each new

year brings increased blessing from the gods of the household in

recompense of piety and duty.[2] Many dedications bring vividly before

us the humbler life of the country cottager, no man's servant or

master, happy in the daily labour over his little plot of land, his

corn-field and vineyard and coppice; of the fowler with his boys in

the woods, the forester and the beekeeper, and the fisherman in his

thatched hut on the beach.[3] And in these contrasted pictures the

"wealth that makes men kind" seems not to jar with the "poverty that

lives with freedom."[4] Modern poetry dwells with more elaboration,

but not with the truer or more delicate feeling than those ancient

epigrams, on the pretty ways of children, the freshness of school-

days, the infinite beauty of the girl as she passes into the woman; or

even such slight things as the school-prize for the best copy-book,

and the child's doll in the well.[5] A shadow passes over the picture

in the complaint of a girl sitting indoors, full of dim thoughts,

while the boys go out to their games and enjoy unhindered the colour

and movement of the streets.[6] But this is the melancholy of youth,

the shadow of the brightness that passes before the maiden's eyes as

she sits, sunk in day-dreams, over her loom;[7] it passes away again

in the portrait of the girl growing up with the sweet eyes of her

mother, the budding rose that will soon unfold its heart of flame;[8]

and once more the bride renders thanks for perfect felicity to the

gods who have given her "a stainless youth and the lover whom she

desired."[9] Many of the most beautiful of the dedicatory epigrams are

thanksgivings after the birth of children; in one a wife says that she

is satisfied with the harmonious life that she and her husband live

together, and asks no further good.[10] Even death coming at the end

of such a life is disarmed of terror. In one of the most graceful

epitaphs of the Roman period[11] the dead man sums up the happiness of

his long life by saying that he never had to weep for any of his

children, and that their tears over him had no bitterness. The

inscription placed by Androtion over the yet empty tomb, which he has

built for himself and his wife and children, expresses that placid

acceptance which finds no cause of complaint with life.[12] Family

affection in an unbroken home; long and happy life of the individual,

and still longer, that of the race which remains; the calm

acquiescence in the law of life which is also the law of death, and

the desire that life and death alike may have their ordinary place and

period, not breaking use and wont; all this is implied here rather

than expressed, in words so simple and straightforward that they seem

to have fallen by accident, as it were, into verse. Thus too in

another epigram the dying wife's last words are praise to the gods of

marriage that she has had even such a husband, and to the gods of

death that he and their children survive her.[13] Or again, where

there is a cry of pain over severance, it is the sweetness of the past

life that makes parting so bitter; "what is there but sorrow," says

Marathonis over the tomb of Nicopolis,[14] "for a man alone upon earth

when his wife is gone?"

----------

[1] Anth. Pal. ix. 649.

[2] Ibid. vi. 267, 280, 340.

[3] Ibid. vi. 226, vii. 156.

[4] {Dunatai to ploutein kai philanthropous poiein}, Menand., {Alieis}

fr. 7; Anth. Pal. ix. 172.

[5] Anth. Pal. vi. 308, ix. 326.

[6] Ibid. v. 297.

[7] Ibid. vi. 266.

[8] Ibid. vi. 353, v. 124.

[9] Ibid. vi. 59.

[10] Ibid. vi. 209.

[11] Ibid. vii. 260.

[12] Ibid. vii. 228.

[13] Anth. Pal. vii. 555.

[14] Ibid. vii. 340.

IX

"Even this stranger, I suppose, prays to the immortals," says Nestor

in the Odyssey,[1] "since all men have need of gods." When the Homeric

poems were written the Greek temper had already formed and ripened;

and so long as it survived, this recognition of religious duty

remained part of it. The deeper and more violent forms of religious

feeling were indeed always alien, and even to a certain degree

repugnant, to the Greek peoples. Mysticism, as has already been

observed, had no place with them; demons and monsters were rejected

from their humane and rationalised mythology, and no superstitious

terrors forced them into elaboration of ritual. There was no priestly

caste; each city and each citizen approached the gods directly at any

time and place. The religious life, as a life distinct from that of an

ordinary citizen, was unknown in Greece. Even at Rome the perpetual

maidenhood of the Vestals was a unique observance; and they were the

keepers of the hearth-fire of the city, not the intermediaries between

it and its gods. But the Vestals have no parallel in Greek life.

Asiatic rites and devotions, it is true, from an early period obtained

a foothold among the populace; but they were either discountenanced,

or by being made part of the civic ritual were disarmed of their

mystic or monastic elements. An epitaph in the Anthology commemorates

two aged priestesses as having been happy in their love for their

husbands and children;[2] nothing could be further from the Eastern or

the medieval sentiment of a consecrated life. Thus, if Greek religion

did not strike deep, it spread wide; and any one, as he thought fit,

might treat his whole life, or any part of it, as a religious act. And

there was a strong feeling that the observance of such duties in a

reasonable manner was proper in itself, besides being probably useful

in its results; no gentleman, if we may so translate the idea into

modern terms, would fail in due courtesy to the gods. That piety

sometimes met with strange returns was an undoubted fact, but that it

should be so inexplicable and indeed shocking even to the least

superstitious and most dispassionate minds.[3]

With the diffusion of a popularised philosophy religious feeling

became fainter among the educated classes, and correspondingly more

uncontrolled in the lower orders. The immense mass of dedicatory

epigrams written in the Alexandrian and Roman periods are in the main

literary exercises, though they were also the supply of a real and

living demand. The fashion outlived the belief; even after the

suppression of pagan worship scholars continued to turn out imitations

of the old models. One book of the Anthology of Agathias[4] consisted

entirely of contemporary epigrams of this sort, "as though dedicated

to former gods." But of epigrams dealing with religion in its more

intimate sense there are, as one would expect, very few in the

Anthology until we come to collections of Christian poetry. This light

form of verse was not suited to the treatment of the deepest subjects.

For the religious poetry of Greece one must go to Pindar and

Sophocles.

But the small selection given here throws some interesting light on

Greek thought with regard to sacred matters. Each business of life,

each change of circumstance, calls for worship and offering. The

sailor, putting to sea with spring, is to pay his sacrifice to the

harbour-god, a simple offering of cakes or fish.[5] The seafarer

should not pass near a great shine without turning aside to pay it

reverence.[6] The traveller, as he crosses a hill-pass or rests by the

wayside fountain, is to give the accustomed honour to the god of the

ground, Pan or Hermes, or whoever holds the spot in special

protection.[7] Each shaded well in the forest, each jut of cliff on

the shore, has its tutelar deity, if only under the form of the

rudely-carved stake set in a garden or on a lonely beach where the

sea-gulls hover; and with their more sumptuous worship the houses of

great gods, all marble and gold, stand overlooking the broad valley or

the shining spaces of sea.[8] Even the wild thicket has its rustic

Pan, to whom the hunter and fowler pray for success in their day's

work, and the image of Demeter stands by the farmer's threshing-

floor.[9] And yet close as the gods come in their daily dealings with

men, scorning no offering, however small, that is made with clean

hands, finding no occasion too trifling for their aid, there is a yet

more homely worship of "little gods"[10] who take the most

insignificant matters in their charge. These are not mere

abstractions, like the lesser deities of the Latin religion, Bonus

Eventus, Tutilina, Iterduca and Domiduca, but they occupy much the

same place in worship. By their side are the heroes, the saints of the

ancient world, who from their graves have some power of hearing and

answering. Like the saints, they belong to all times, from the most

remote to the most recent. The mythical Philopregmon, a shadowy being

dating back to times of primitive worship, gives luck from his

monument on the roadside by the gate of Potidaea.[11] But the

traveller who had prayed to him in the morning as he left the town

might pay the same duty next evening by the tomb of Brasidas in the

market-place of Amphipolis.[12]

But alongside of the traditional worship of these multitudinous and

multiform deities, a grave and deep religious sense laid stress on the

single quality of goodness as being essentially akin to divinity, and

spoke with aversion of complicated ritual and extravagant sacrifice. A

little water purifies the good man; the whole ocean is not sufficient

to wash away the guilt of the sinner.[13] "Holiness is a pure mind,"

said the inscription over the doorway of a great Greek temple.[14] The

sanctions of religion were not indeed independent of rewards and

punishments, in this or in a future state. But the highest Greek

teachings never laid great stress on these; and even where they are

adduced as a motive for good living, they are always made secondary to

the excellence of piety here and in itself. Through the whole course

of Greek thought the belief in a future state runs in an undercurrent.

A striking fragment of Sophocles[15] speaks of the initiated alone as

being happy, since their state after death is secure. Plato, while he

reprobates the teaching which would make men good in view of the other

world, and insists on the natural excellence of goodness for its own

sake, himself falls back on the life after death, as affected for good

or evil by our acts here, in the visions, "no fairy-tales,"[16] which

seem to collect and reinforce the arguments of the /Phaedo/ and the

/Republic/. But the ordinary thought and practice ignored what might

happen after death. Life was what concerned men and absorbed them; it

seemed sufficient for them to think about what they knew of.[17] The

revolution which Christianity brought into men's way of thinking as

regards life and death was that it made them know more certainly, or

so it seemed, about the latter than about the former. Who knows,

Euripides had long ago asked, if life be not death, and death life?

and the new religion answered his question with an emphatic

affirmation that it was so; that this life was momentary and shadowy,

was but a death, in comparison of the life unchangeable and eternal.

The dedicatory epigram was one of the earliest forms of Greek poetry.

Herodotus quotes verses inscribed on offerings at Thebes, written in

"Cadmean letters," and dating back to a mythical antiquity;[18] and

actual dedications are extant which are at least as early as 600

B.C.[19] In this earlier period the verses generally contained nothing

more than a bare record of the act. Even at a later date, the

anathematic epigrams of Simonides are for the most part rather stiff

and formal when set beside his epitaphs. His nephew Bacchylides

brought the art to perfection, if it is safe to judge from a single

flawless specimen.[20] But it is hardly till the Alexandrian period

that the dedication has elaborate pains bestowed upon it simply for

the feeling and expression as a form of poetry; and it is to this

period that the mass of the best prayers and dedications belong.

Ranging as they do over the whole variety of human action, these

epigrams show us the ancient world in its simplest and most pleasant

aspect. Family life has its offerings for the birth of a child, for

return from travel, for recovery from sickness. The eager and curious

spirit of youth, and old age to which nothing but rest seems good,

each offer prayer to the guardians of the traveller or of the

home.[21] The most numerous and the most beautiful are those where,

towards the end of life, dedications are made with thanksgiving for

the past and prayer for what remains. The Mediterranean merchantman

retires to his native town and offers prayer to the protector of the

city to grant him a quiet age there, or dedicates his ship, to dance

no more "like a feather on the sea," now that its master has set his

weary feet on land.[22] The fisherman, ceasing his labours, hangs up

his fish-spear to Poseidon, saying, "Thou knowest I am tired." The old

hunter, whose hand has lost its suppleness, dedicates his nets to the

Nymphs, as all that he has to give. The market-gardener, when he has

saved a competence, lays his worn tools before Priapus the Garden-

Keeper. Heracles and Artemis receive the aged soldier's shield into

their temples, that it may grow old there amid the sound of hymns and

the dances of maidens.[23] Quiet peace, as of the greyness of a summer

evening, is the desired end.

The diffusion of Greece under Alexander and his successors, as at a

later period the diffusion of Rome under the Empire, brought with the

decay of civic spirit a great increase of humanity. The dedication

written by Theocritus for his friend Nicias of Miletus[24] gives a

vivid picture of the gracious atmosphere of a rich and cultured Greek

home, of the happy union of science and art with harmonious family

life and kindly helpfulness and hospitality. Care for others was a

more controlling motive in life than before. The feeling grew that we

are all one family, and owe each other the service and thoughtfulness

due to kinsfolk, till Menander could say that true life was living for

others.[25] In this spirit the sailor, come safe ashore, offers prayer

to Poseidon that others who cross the sea may be as fortunate; so too,

from the other side of the matter, Pan of the sea-cliff promises a

favourable wind to all strangers who sail by him, in remembrance of

the pious fisherman who set his statue there, as guardian of their

trawling-nets and eel-baskets.[26]

In revulsion from the immense accumulation of material wealth in this

period, a certain refined simplicity was then the ideal of the best

minds, as it was afterwards in the early Roman Empire, as it is in our

own day. The charm of the country was, perhaps for the first time,

fully realised; the life of gardens became a passion, and hardly less

so the life of the opener air, of the hill and meadow, of the shepherd

and hunter, the farmer and fisherman. The rules of art, like the

demands of heaven, were best satisfied with small and simple

offerings. "The least of a little"[27] was sufficient to lay before

gods who had no need of riches; and as the art of the epigrammatist

grew more refined, the poet took pride in working with the slightest

materials. The husbandman lays a handful of corn-ears before Demeter,

the gardener a basket of ripe fruit at the feet of Priapus; the

implements of their craft are dedicated by the carpenter and the

goldsmith; the young girl and the aged woman offer their even slighter

gift, the spindle and distaff, the reel of wool, and the rush-woven

basket.[28] A staff of wild-olive cut in the coppice is accepted by

the lord of the myriad-boughed forest; the Muses are pleased with

their bunch of roses wet with morning dew.[29] The boy Daphnis offers

his fawnskin and scrip of apples to the great divinity of Pan;[30] the

young herdsman and his newly-married wife, still with the rose-garland

on her hair, make prayer and thanksgiving with a cream cheese and a

piece of honeycomb to the mistress of a hundred cities, Aphrodite with

her house of gold.[31] The hard and laborious life of the small farmer

was touched with something of the natural magic that saturates the

Georgics; "rich with fair fleeces, and fair wine, and fair fruit of

corn," and blessed by the gracious Seasons whose feet pass over the

furrows.[32] On the green slope Pan himself makes solitary music to

the shepherd in the divine silence of the hills.[33] The fancy of

three brothers, a hunter, a fowler, and a fisherman, meeting to make

dedication of the spoils of their crafts to the country-god, was one

which had a special charm for epigrammatists; it is treated by no less

than nine poets, whose dates stretch over as many centuries.[34] Sick

of cities, the imagination turned to an Arcadia that thenceforth was

to fill all poetry with the music of its names and the fresh chill of

its pastoral air; the lilied banks of Ladon, the Erymanthian water,

the deep woodland of Pholoë and the grey steep of Cyllene.[35] Nature

grew full of a fresh and lovely divinity. A spirit dwells under the

sea, and looks with kind eyes on the creatures that go up and down in

its depths; Artemis flashes by in the rustle of the windswept oakwood,

and the sombre shade of the pines makes a roof for Pan; the wild hill

becomes a sanctuary, for ever unsown and unmown, where the Spirit of

Nature, remote and invisible, feeds his immortal flock and fulfils his

desire.[36]

----------

[1] Od. iii. 47.

[2] Anth. Pal. vii. 733; cf. also v. 14 in this selection.

[3] Cf. Thuc. vii. 86.

[4] Anth. Pal. iv. 3, ll. 113-116.

[5] Ibid. vi. 105; x. 14.

[6] Ibid. vi. 251; cf. v. 3 in this selection.

[7] App. Plan. 227; Anth. Pal. x. 12.

[8] App. Plan. 291; Anth. Pal. vi. 22, 119, ix. 144, x. 8, 10.

[9] Anth. Pal. x. 11, vi. 98.

[10] Ibid. ix. 334.

[11] Ibid. vii. 694.

[12] Thuc. v. 11; Arist. Eth. v. 7.

[13] Anth. Pal. xiv. 71.

[14] v. 15 in this selection.

[15] Fr. anon. 719.

[16] {ou mentoi soi Alkinou ge apologon ero}, Plato, Rep. 614 B.

[17] {To zen gar ismen tou thanein d apeiria

Pas tis phobeitai phos lipein tod eliou}--Eurip. Phoenix, fr. 9.

[18] Hdt. v. 60, 61.

[19] See Kaibel, Epigr. Gr. 738-742.

[20] Anth. Pal. vi. 53.

[21] Anth. Pal. x. 6, vi. 70.

[22] Ibid. ix. 7, vi. 70.

[23] Ibid. vi. 30, 25, 21, 178, 127.

[24] Ibid. vi. 337; cf. Theocr. Idyl xxii.

[25] Frag. incert. 257, {tout esti to zen oukh eauto zen monon}.

[26] Anth. Pal. x. 10, 24.

[27] Ibid. vi. 98, {ek mikron oligista}.

[28] Ibid. vi. 98, 102; 103, 92; 174, 247.

[29] Ibid. vi. 3, 336.

[30] Ibid. vi. 177.

[31] Ibid. vi. 55; cf. vi. 119, xii. 131.

[32] Anth. Pal. vi. 31, 98.

[33] App. Plan. 17; cf. Lucret. v. 1387.

[34] Anth. Pal. vi. 11-16, and 179-187. The poets are Leonidas of

Tarentum, Alcaeus of Messene, Antipater of Sidon, Alexander,

Julius Diocles, Satyrus, Archias, Zosimus and Julianus Aegyptius.

[35] Anth. Pal. vi. 111, App. Plan. 188: compare Song iii. in Milton's

/Arcades/.

[36] Anth. Pal. x. 8; vi. 253, 268; vi. 79.

X

Though the section of the Palatine Anthology dealing with works of

art, if it ever existed, is now completely lost, we have still left a

considerable number of epigrams which come under this head. Many are

preserved in the Planudean Anthology. Many more, on account of the

cross-division of subjects that cannot be avoided in arranging any

collection of poetry, are found in other sections of the Palatine

Anthology. It was a favourite device, for example, to cast a criticism

or eulogy of an author or artist into the form of an imaginary

epitaph; and this was often actually inscribed on a monument, or

beneath a bust, in the galleries or gardens of a wealthy /virtuoso/.

Thus the sepulchral epigrams include inscriptions of this sort of many

of the most distinguished names of Greek literature. They are mainly

on poets and philosophers; Homer and Hesiod, the great tragedians and

comedians, the long roll of the lyric poets, most frequently among

them Sappho, Alcman, Erinna, Archilochus, Pindar, and the whole line

of philosophers from Thales and Anaxagoras down to the latest teachers

in the schools of Athens. Often in those epigrams some vivid epithet

or fine touch of criticism gives a real value to them even now; the

"frowning towers" of the Aeschylean tragedy, the trumpet-note of

Pindar, the wealth of lovely flower and leaf, crisp Archanian ivy,

rose and vine, that clusters round the tomb of Sophocles.[1] Those on

the philosophers are, as one would expect, generally of inferior

quality.

Many again are to be found among the miscellaneous section of

epideictic epigrams. Instances which deal with literature directly are

the noble lines of Alpheus on Homer, the interesting epigram on the

authorship of the /Phaedo/, the lovely couplet on the bucolic

poets.[2] Some are inscriptions for libraries or collections;[3]

others are on particular works of art. Among these last, epigrams on

statues or pictures dealing with the power of music are specially

notable; the conjunction, in this way, of the three arts seems to have

given peculiar pleasure to the refined and eclectic culture of the

Graeco-Roman period. The contest of Apollo and Marsyas, the piping of

Pan to Echo, and the celebrated subject of the Faun listening for the

sound of his own flute,[4] are among the most favourite and the most

gracefully treated of this class. Even more beautiful, however, than

these, and worthy to take rank with the finest "sonnets on pictures"

of modern poets, is the epigram ascribed to Theocritus, and almost

certainly written for a picture,[5] which seems to place the whole

world of ancient pastoral before our eyes. The grouping of the figures

is like that in the famous Venetian Pastoral of Giorgione; in both

alike are the shadowed grass, the slim pipes, the hand trailing upon

the viol-string. But the execution has the matchless simplicity, the

incredible purity of outline, that distinguishes Greek work from that

of all other races.

A different view of art and literature, and one which adds

considerably to our knowledge of the ancient feeling about them, is

given by another class of pieces, the irrisory epigrams of the

Anthology. Then, as now, people were amused by bad and bored by

successful artists, and delighted to laugh at both; then, as now, the

life of the scholar or the artist had its meaner side, and lent itself

easily to ridicule from without, to jealousy and discontent from

within. The air rang with jeers at the portrait-painter who never got

a likeness, the too facile composer whose body was to be burned on a

pile of five-and-twenty chests all filled with his own scores, the bad

grammar of the grammarian, the supersubtle logic and the cumbrous

technical language of the metaphysician, the disastrous fertility of

the authors of machine-made epics.[6] The poor scholar had become

proverbial; living in a garret where the very mice were starved,

teaching the children of the middle classes for an uncertain pittance,

glad to buy a dinner with a dedication, and gradually petrifying in

the monotony of a thousand repetitions of stock passages and lectures

to empty benches.[7] Land and sea swarmed with penniless

grammarians.[8] The epigrams of Palladas of Alexandria bring before us

vividly the miseries of a schoolmaster. Those of Callimachus shew with

as painful clearness how the hatred of what was bad in literature

might end in embittering the whole nature.[9] Many epigrams are extant

which indicate that much of a scholar's life, even when he had not to

earn bitter bread on the stairs of patrons, was wasted in laborious

pedantry or in personal jealousies and recriminations.[10]

Of epigrams on individual works of art it is not necessary to say

much. Their numbers must have been enormous. The painted halls and

colonnades, common in all Greek towns, had their stories told in verse

below; there was hardly a statue or picture of any note that was not

the subject of a short poem. A collected series of works of art had

its corresponding series of epigrams. The Anthology includes, among

other lists, a description of nineteen subjects carved in relief on

the pedestals of the columns in a temple at Cyzicus, and another of

seventy-three bronze statues which stood in the great hall of a

gymnasium at Constantinople.[11] Any celebrated work like the Niobe of

Praxiteles, or the bronze heifer of Myron, was the practising-ground

for every tried or untried poet, seeking new praise for some clever

conceit or neater turn of language than had yet been invented.

Especially was this so with the trifling art of the decadence and its

perpetual round of childish Loves: Love ploughing, Love holding a fish

and a flower as symbols of his sovereignty over sea and land, Love

asleep on a pepper-castor, Love blowing a torch, Love grasping or

breaking the thunderbolt, Love with a helmet, a shield, a quiver, a

trident, a club, a drum.[12] Enough of this class of epigrams are

extant to be perfectly wearisome, were it not that, like the engraved

gems from which their subjects are principally taken, they are all,

however trite in subject or commonplace in workmanship, wrought in the

same beautiful material, in that language which is to all other

languages as a gem to an ordinary pebble.

From these sources we are able to collect a body of epigrams which in

a way cover the field of ancient art and literature. Sometimes they

preserve fragments of direct criticism, verbal or real. We have

epigrams on fashions in prose style, on conventional graces of

rhetoric, on the final disappearance of ancient music in the sixth

century.[13] Of art-criticism in the modern sense there is but little.

The striking epigram of Parrhasius, on the perfection attainable in

painting,[14] is almost a solitary instance. Pictures and statues are

generally praised for their actual or imagined realism. Silly stories

like those of the birds pecking at the grapes of Zeuxis, or the calf

who went up to suck the bronze cow of Myron, represent the general

level of the critical faculty. Even Aristotle, it must be remembered,

who represents the most finished Greek criticism, places the pleasure

given by works of art in the recognition by the spectator of things

which he has already seen. "The reason why people enjoy seeing

pictures is that the spectators learn and infer what each object is;

/this/, they say, /is so and so/; while if one has not seen the thing

before, the pleasure is produced not by the imitation,"--or by the

art, for he uses the two terms convertibly--"but by the execution, the

colour, or some such cause."[15] And Plato (though on this subject one

can never be quite sure that Plato is serious) talks of the graphic

art as three times removed from realities, being only employed to make

copies of semblances of the external objects which are themselves the

copies or shadows of the ideal truth of things.[16] So far does Greek

thought seem to be from the conception of an ideal art which is nearer

truth than nature is, which nature itself indeed tries with perpetual

striving, and ever incomplete success, to copy, which, as Aristotle

does in one often quoted passage admit with regard to poetry, has a

higher truth and a deeper seriousness than that of actual things.

But this must not be pressed too far. The critical faculty, even where

fully present, may be overpowered by the rhetorical impulse; and of

all forms of poetry the epigram has the greatest right to be fanciful.

"This is the Satyr of Diodorus; if you touch it, it will awake; the

silver is asleep,"[17]--obviously this play of fancy has nothing to do

with serious criticism. And of a really serious feeling about art

there is sufficient evidence, as in the pathos of the sculptured

Ariadne, happy in sleeping and being stone, and even more strongly in

the lines on the picture of the Faun, which have the very tone and

spirit of the /Ode on a Grecian Urn/.[18]

Two epigrams above all deserve special notice; one almost universally

known, that written by Callimachus on his dead friend, the poet

Heraclitus of Halicarnassus; the other, no less noble, though it has

not the piercing tenderness of the first, by Claudius Ptolemaeus, the

great astronomer, upon his own science, a science then not yet

divorced from art and letters. The picture touched by Callimachus of

that ancient and brilliant life, where two friends, each an

accomplished scholar, each a poet, saw the summer sun set in their

eager talk, and listened through the dusk to the singing nightingales,

is a more exquisite tribute than all other ancient writings have given

to the imperishable delight of literature, the mingled charm of youth

and friendship, and the first stirring of the blood by poetry, and the

first lifting of the soul by philosophy.[19] And on yet a further

height, above the nightingales, under the solitary stars alone,

Ptolemy as he traces the celestial orbits is lifted above the touch of

earth, and recognises in man's mortal and ephemeral substance a

kinship with the eternal. /Man did eat angels' food: he opened the

doors of heaven./[20]

----------

[1] Anth. Pal. vii. 39, 34, 21, 22.

[2] Ibid. ix. 97, 358, 205.

[3] Cf. iv. 1 in this selection.

[4] Anth. Pal. vii. 696, App. Plan. 8, 225, 226, 244.

[5] Anth. Pal. ix. 433. On this epigram Jacobs says, /Frigide hoc

carmen interpretantur qui illud tabulae pictae adscriptum fuisse

existimant/. But the art of poems on pictures, which flourished to

an immense degree in the Alexandrian and later periods, had not

then been revived. One can fancy the same note being made hundreds

of years hence on some of Rossetti's sonnets.

[6] Anth. Pal. xi. 215, 133, 143, 354, 136.

[7] Ibid. vi. 303, ix. 174, vi. 310; cf. also x. 35 in this selection.

[8] Ibid. xi. 400.

[9] Compare Anth. Pal. xii. 43 with ix. 565.

[10] Ibid. xi. 140, 142, 275.

[11] Anth. Pal. ii., iii.

[12] App. Plan. 200, 207, 208, 209, 214, 215, 250.

[13] Anth. Pal. xi. 141, 142, 144, 157; vii. 571.

[14] iv. 46 in this selection.

[15] Poet. 1448 b. 15-20.

[16] Republic, x. 597.

[17] App. Plan. 248.

[18] App. Plan. 146, 244.

[19] Anth. Pal. vii. 80. Cf. In Memoriam, xxiii.

[20] Anth. Pal. ix. 577; notice especially {theies pimplamai

ambrosies}.

XI

That the feeling for Nature is one of the new developments of the

modern spirit, is one of those commonplaces of criticism which express

vaguely and loosely a general impression gathered from the comparison

of ancient with modern poetry. Like most of such generalisations it is

not of much value unless defined more closely; and as the definition

of the rule becomes more accurate, the exceptions and limitations to

be made grow correspondingly numerous. The section which is here

placed under this heading is obviously different from any collection

which could be made of modern poems, professing to deal with Nature

and not imitated from the Greek. But when we try to analyse the

difference, we find that the word Nature is one of the most ambiguous

possible. Man's relation to Nature is variable not only from age to

age, and from race to race, but from individual to individual, and

from moment to moment. And the feeling for Nature, as expressed in

literature, varies not only with all these variations but with other

factors as well, notably with the prevalent mode of poetical

expression, and with the condition of the other arts. The outer world

lies before us all alike, with its visible facts, its demonstrable

laws, /Natura daedala rerum/; but with each of us the /species

ratioque naturae/, the picture presented by the outer world and the

meaning that underlies it, are created in our own minds, the one by

the apprehensions of our senses (and the eye sees what it brings the

power to see), the other by our emotions, our imagination, our

intellectual and moral qualities, as all these are affected by the

pageant of things, and affect it in turn. And in no case can we

express in words the total impression made upon us, but only that

amount of it for which we possess a language of sufficient range and

power and flexibility. For an impression has permanence and value--

indeed one may go further and say has reality--only in so far as it is

fixed and recorded in language, whether in the language of words or

that of colours, forms, and sounds.

First in the natural order comes that simply sensuous view of the

outer world, where combination and selection have as yet little or no

part. Objects are distinct from one another, each creates a single

impression, and the effect of each is summed up in a single phrase.

The "constant epithet" of early poetry is a survival of this stage of

thought; nature is a series of things, every one of which has its

special note; "green grass," "wet water." Here the feeling for Nature

likewise is simple and sensuous; the pleasure of shade and cool water

in summer, of soft grass to lie on, of the flowers and warm sunshine

of spring.

Then out of this infancy of feeling rises the curiosity of childhood;

no longer content with noting and recording the obvious aspects of

Nature, man observes and inquires and pays attention. The more

attention is paid, the more is seen: and an immense growth follows in

the language of poetry. To express the feeling for nature description

becomes necessary, and this again involves, in order that the work may

not be endless, selection and composition.

Again, upon this comes the sentimental feeling for Nature, a sort of

sympathy created by interest and imagination. Among early races this,

like other feelings, expresses itself in the forms of mythology, and

half personifies the outer world, giving the tree her Dryad and the

fountain her Nymph, making Pan and Echo meet in the forest glade. When

the mythological instinct has ceased to be active, it results in

sentimental description, sometimes realistic in detail, sometimes

largely or even wholly conventional. It has always in it something of

a reaction, real or affected, from crowds and the life of cities, an

attempt to regain simplicity by isolation from the complex fabric of

society.

Once more, the feeling for Nature may go deeper than the senses and

the imagination, and become moral. The outer world is then no more a

spectacle only, but the symbol of a meaning, the embodiment of a soul.

Earth, the mother and fostress, receives our sympathy and gives us her

own. The human spirit turns away from itself to seek sustenance from

the mountains and the stars. The whole outer universe becomes the

visible and sensible language of an ideal essence; and dawn or sunset,

winter or summer, is of the nature of a sacrament.

There is over and above all these another sense in which we may speak

of the feeling for Nature; and in regard to poetry it is perhaps the

most important of all. But it no longer follows, like the rest, a sort

of law of development in human nature generally; it is confined to

art, and among the arts is eminent in poetry beyond the rest. This is

the romantic or magical note. It cannot be analysed, perhaps it cannot

be defined; the insufficiency of all attempted definitions of poetry

is in great part due to the impossibility of their including this

final quality, which, like some volatile essence, escapes the moment

the phial is touched. In the poetry of all ages, even in the periods

where it has been most intellectual and least imaginative, come sudden

lines like the /Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles/ of

Corneille, like the /Placed far amid the melancholy main/ of Thomson,

where the feeling for Nature cannot be called moral, and yet stirs us

like the deepest moral criticism upon life, rising as far beyond the

mere idealism of sentiment as it does beyond the utmost refinement of

realistic art.

In all these different forms the feeling for Nature may be illustrated

from Greek poetry; but the broad fact remains that Nature on the whole

has a smaller part than it has with modern poets. Descriptive pieces

are executed in a slighter manner, and on the whole with a more

conventional treatment. Landscapes, for example, are always a

background, never (or hardly ever) the picture itself. The influence

of mythology on art was so overwhelming that, down to the last, it

determined the treatment of many subjects where we should now go

directly to the things themselves. Especially is this so with what has

been described as the moral feeling for nature. Among "the

unenlightened swains of Pagan Greece," as Wordsworth says, the deep

effect of natural beauty on the mind was expressed under the forms of

a concrete symbolism, a language to which literature had grown so

accustomed that they had neither the power nor the wish to break free

from it. The appeal indeed from man to Nature, and especially the

appeal to Nature as knowing more about man's destiny than he knows

himself, was unknown to the Greek poets. But this feeling is

sentimental, not moral; and with them too "something far more deeply

interfused" stirred the deepest sources of emotion. The music of Pan,

at which the rustle of the oakwood ceases and the waterfall from the

cliff is silent and the faint bleating of the sheep dies away,[1] is

the expression in an ancient language of the spirit of Nature, fixed

and embodied by the enchanting touch of art.

Of the epigrams which deal primarily with the sensuous feeling for

Nature, the most common are those on the delight of summer, rustling

breezes and cold springs and rest under the shadow of trees. In the

ardours of midday the traveller is guided from the road over a grassy

brow to an ice-cold spring that gushes out of the rock under a pine;

or lying idly on the soft meadow in the cool shade of the plane, is

lulled by the whispering west wind through the branches, the monotone

of the cicalas, the faint sound of a far-off shepherd's pipe floating

down the hills; or looking up into the heart of the oak, sees the dim

green roof, layer upon layer, mount and spread and shut out the

sky.[2] Or the citizen, leaving the glare of town, spends a country

holiday on strewn willow-boughs with wine and music,[3] as in that

most perfect example of the poetry of a summer day, the /Thalysia/ of

Theocritus. Down to a late Byzantine period this form of poetry, the

nearest approach to pure description of nature in the old world,

remained alive; as in the picture drawn by Arabius of the view from a

villa on the shore of the Propontis, with its gardens set between wood

and sea, where the warbling of birds mingled with the distant songs of

the ferrymen.[4] Other landscape poems, as they may be called,

remarkable for their clear and vivid portraiture, are that of

Mnasalcas,[5] the low shore with its bright surf, and the temple with

its poplars round which the sea-fowl hover and cry, and that of

Anyte,[6] the windy orchard-close near the grey colourless coast, with

the well and the Hermes standing over it at the crossways. But such

epigrams always stop short of the description of natural objects for

their own sake, for the mere delight in observing and speaking about

them. Perhaps the nearest approach that Greek poetry makes to this is

in a remarkable fragment of Sophocles,[7] describing the shiver that

runs through the leaves of a poplar when all the other trees stand

silent and motionless.

The descriptions of Nature too are, as a rule, not only slightly

sketched, but kept subordinate to a human relation. The brilliance and

loveliness of spring is the background for the picture of the sailor

again putting to sea, or the husbandman setting his plough at work in

the furrow; the summer woods are a resting-place for the hot and

thirsty traveller; the golden leaves of autumn thinning in the frosty

night, making haste to be gone before the storms of rough November,

are a frame for the boy beneath them.[8] The life of earth is rarely

thought of as distinct from the life of man. It is so in a few late

epigrams. The complaint of the cicala, torn away by shepherds from its

harmless green life of song and dew among the leaves, and the poem

bidding the blackbird leave the dangerous oak, where, with its breast

against a spray, it pours out its clear music,[9] are probably of

Roman date; another of uncertain period but of great beauty, an

epitaph on an old bee-keeper who lived alone on the hills with the

high woods and pastures for his only neighbours, contrasts with a

strangely modern feeling the perpetuity of nature and the return of

the works of spring with the brief life of man that ends once for all

on a cold winter night.[10]

Between the simply sensuous and the deep moral feeling for nature lies

the broad field of pastoral. This is not the place to enter into the

discussion of pastoral poetry; but it must be noted in passing that it

does not imply of necessity any deep love, and still less any close

observation, of nature. It looks on nature, as it looks on human life,

through a medium of art and sentiment; and its treatment of nature

depends less on the actual world around it than on the prevalent art

of the time. Greek art concentrated its efforts on the representation

of the human figure, and even there preferred the abstract form and

the rigid limitations of sculpture; and the poetry that saw, as it

were, through the eyes of art sought above all things simplicity of

composition and clearness of outline. The scanty vocabulary of colour

in Greek poetry, so often noticed, is a special and patent example of

this difference in the spirit with which Nature was regarded. As the

poetry of Chaucer corresponds, in its wealth and intimacy of

decoration, to the illuminations and tapestries of the middle ages, so

the epigrams given under this section constantly recall the sculptured

reliefs and the engraved gems of Greek art.

But any such general rules must be taken with their exceptions. As

there is a risk of reading modern sentiment into ancient work, and

even of fixing on the startling modernisms that occur in Greek

poetry,[11] and dwelling on them till they assume an exaggerated

importance, so there is a risk perhaps as great of slurring over the

inmost quality, the poetry of the poetry, where it has that touch of

romance or magic that sets it beyond all our generalisations. The

magical charm is just what cannot be brought under any rules; it is

the result less of art than of instinct, and is almost independent of

time and place. The lament of the swallow in an Alexandrian poet[12]

touches the same note of beauty and longing that Keats drew from the

song of the nightingale; the couplet of Satyrus, where echo repeats

the lonely cry of the birds,[13] is, however different in tone, as

purely romantic as the opening lines of /Christabel/.

----------

[1] Anth. Pal. ix. 823.

[2] App. Plan. 230, 227; Anth. Pal. ix. 71.

[3] vi. 28 in this selection.

[4] Anth. Pal. ix. 667.

[5] Ibid. ix. 333.

[6] Ibid. ix. 314.

[7] Aegeus, fr. 24; cf. the celebrated simile in /Hyperion/,

beginning, /As when upon a tranced summer night/.

[8] Anth. Pal. xii. 138.

[9] Ibid. ix. 373, 87.

[10] Ibid. vii. 717.

[11] A curious instance is in an epigram by Mnasalcas (Anth. Pal. vii.

194), where he speaks of the evening hymn ({panesperon umnon}) of

the grasshopper. This, it must be remembered, was written in the

third century B.C.

[12] Pamphilus in Anth. Pal. ix. 57.

[13] App. Plan. 153.

XII

Though fate and death make a dark background against which the

brilliant colouring of Greek life glitters out with heightened

magnificence, the comedy of men and manners occupies an important part

of their literature, and Aristophanes and Menander are as intimately

Greek as Sophocles. It is needless to speak of what we gain in our

knowledge of Greece from the preserved comedies of Aristophanes; and

if we follow the best ancient criticism, we must conclude that in

Menander we have lost a treasury of Greek life that cannot be

replaced. Quintilian, speaking at a distance from any national or

contemporary prejudice, uses terms of him such as we should not think

unworthy of Shakespeare.[1] These Attic comedians were the field out

of which epigrammatists, from that time down to the final decay of

literature, drew some of their graver and very many of their lighter

epigrams. Of the convivial epigrams in the Anthology a number are

imitated from extant fragments of the New Comedy; one at least[2]

transfers a line of Menander's unaltered; and short fragments of both

Menander and Diphilus are included in the Anthology as though not

materially differing from epigrams themselves.[3]

Part of this section might be classed with the criticism of life from

the Epicurean point of view. Some of the convivial epigrams are purely

unreflective; they speak only of the pleasure of the moment, the frank

joy in songs and wine and roses, at a vintage-revel, or in the

chartered licence of a public festival, or simply without any excuse

but the fire in the blood, and without any conclusion but the emptied

jar.[4] Some bring in a flash of more vivid colour where Eros mingles

with Bromius, and, on a bright spring day, Rose-flower crosses the

path, carrying her fresh-blown roses.[5] Others, through their light

surface, show a deeper feeling, a claim half jestingly but half

seriously made for dances and lyres and garlands as things deeply

ordained in the system of nature, a call on the disconsolate lover to

be up and drink, and rear his drooping head, and not lie down in the

dust while he is yet alive.[6] Some in complete seriousness put the

argument for happiness with the full force of logic and sarcasm. "All

the ways of life are pleasant," cries Julianus in reply to the

weariness expressed by an earlier poet;[7] "in country or town, alone

or among fellow-men, dowered with the graciousness of wife and

children, or living on in the free and careless life of youth; all is

well, live!" And the answer to melancholy has never been put in a

concrete form with finer and more penetrating wit than in the couplet

of Lucian on the man who must needs be sober when all were drinking,

and so appeared in respect of his company to be the one drunk man

there.[8]

It is here that the epigrams of comedy reach their high-water mark; in

contrast to them is another class in which the lightness is a little

forced and the humour touches cynicism. In these the natural brutality

of the Roman mind makes the Latin epigram heavier and keener-pointed;

the greater number indeed of the Greek epigrams of this complexion are

of the Roman period; and many of them appear to be directly imitated

from Martial and Juvenal, though possibly in some cases it is the

Latin poet who is the copyist.

Though they are not actually kept separate--nor indeed would a

complete separation be possible--the heading of this section of the

Palatine Anthology distinguishes the {sumpotika}, the epigrams of

youth and pleasure, from the {skoptika}, the witty or humorous verses

which have accidentally in modern English come almost to absorb the

full signification of the word epigram. The latter come principally

under two heads: one, where the point of the epigram depends on an

unexpected verbal turn, the other, where the humour lies in some gross

exaggeration of statement. Or these may be combined; in some of the

best there is an accumulation of wit, a second and a third point

coming suddenly on the top of the first.[9]

Perhaps the saying, so often repeated, that ancient humour was simpler

than modern, rests on a more sufficient basis than most similar

generalisations; and indeed there is no single criterion of the

difference between one age and another more easy and certain of

application, where the materials for applying it exist, than to

compare the things that seem amusing to them. A certain foundation of

humour seems to be the common inheritance of mankind, but on it

different periods build differently. The structure of a Greek joke is

generally very simple; more obvious and less highly elliptical in

thought than the modern type, but, on the other hand, considerably

more subtle than the wit of the middle ages. There was a store of

traditional jests on the learned professions, law, astrology, medicine

--the last especially; and the schools of rhetoric and philosophy

were, from their first beginning, the subject of much pleasantry. Any

popular reputation, in painting, music, literature, gave material for

facetious attack; and so did any bodily defect, even those, it must be

added, which we think of now as exciting pity or as to be passed over

in silence.[10] Many of these jokes, which even then may have been of

immemorial antiquity, are still current. The serpent that bit a

Cappadocian and died of it, the fashionable lady whose hair is all her

own, and paid for,[11] are instances of this simple form of humour

that has no beginning nor end. Some Greek jests have an Irish

inconsequence, some the grave and logical monstrosity of American

humour.

Naïve, crude, often vulgar; such is the general impression produced by

the mass of these lighter epigrams. The bulk of them are of late date;

and the culture of the ancient world was running low when its /vers de

société/ reached no higher level than this. Of course they can only be

called poetry by a large stretch of courtesy. In a few instances the

work is raised to the level of art by a curious Dutch fidelity and

minute detail. In one given in this selection,[12] a great poet has

bent to this light and trivial style. The high note of Simonides is as

clear and certain here as in his lines on the Spartans at Thermopylae

or in the cry of grief over the young man dead in the snow-clogged

surf of the Saronic sea. With such exceptions, the only touch of

poetry is where a graver note underlies their light insolence. "Drink

with me," runs the Greek song, "be young with me; love with me, wear

garlands with me; be mad with me in my madness; I will be serious with

you in your seriousness."[13] And so behind the flutes and flowers

change comes and the shadow of fate stands waiting, and through the

tinkling of the rose-hung river is heard in undertone the grave murmur

of the sea.

----------

[1] /Omnem vitae imaginem expressit . . . omnibus rebus, personis,

adfectibus accomodatus/: see the whole passage, Inst. Rhet. x. i.

69-72.

[2] Anth. Pal. xi. 286.

[3] Ibid. xi. 438, 439.

[4] Ibid. v. 134, 135; xi. 1.

[5] Ibid. v. 81; xi. 64.

[6] Anth. Pal. ix. 270; xii. 50.

[7] Ibid. ix. 446.

[8] Ibid. xi. 429.

[9] Cf. ibid. xi. 85, 143.

[10] Cf. Anth. Pal. xi. 342, 404.

[11] Ibid. xi. 68, 237.

[12] Infra, x. 5.

[13] Athenaeus, 695, d.

XIII

For over all Greek life there lay a shadow. Man, a weak and pitiable

creature, lay exposed to the shafts of a grim and ironic power that

went its own way careless of him, or only interfered to avenge its own

slighted majesty. "God is always jealous and troublesome"; such is the

reflection which Herodotus, the pious historian of a pious age, puts

in the mouth of the wisest of the Greeks.[1] Punishment will sooner or

later follow sin; that is certain; but it is by no means so certain

that the innocent will not be involved with the guilty, or that

offence will not be taken where none was meant. The law of /laesa

majestas/ was executed by the ruling powers of the universe with

unrelenting and undiscriminating severity. Fate seemed to take a

sardonic pleasure in confounding expectation, making destruction

spring out of apparent safety, and filling life with dramatic and

memorable reversals of fortune.

And besides the bolts launched by fate, life was as surely if more

slowly weighed down by the silent and ceaseless tide of change against

which nothing stood fixed or permanent, and which swept the finest and

most beautiful things away the soonest. The garland that blooms at

night withers by morning; and the strength of man and the beauty of

women are no longer-lived than the frail anemone, the lily and violet

that flower and fall.[2] Sweetness is changed to bitterness; where the

rose has spread her cup, one goes by and the brief beauty passes;

returning, the seeker finds no rose, but a thorn. Swifter than the

flight of a bird through the air the light-footed Hours pass by,

leaving nothing but scattered petals and the remembrance of youth and

spring.[3] The exhortation to use the brief space of life, to realise,

and, so far as that may be, to perpetuate in action the whole of the

overwhelming possibilities crowded into a minute's space[4] comes with

a passion like that of Shakespeare's sonnets. "On this short day of

frost and sun to sleep before evening" is the one intolerable misuse

of life.[5] Sometimes the feeling is expressed with the vivid passion

of a lyric:--"To what profit? for thou wilt not find a lover among the

dead, O girl";[6] sometimes with the curiously impersonal and

incomparably direct touch that is peculiar to Greek, as in the verses

by Antipater of Sidon,[7] that by some delicate magic crowd into a few

words the fugitive splendour of the waning year, the warm lingering

days and sharp nights of autumn, and the brooding pause before the

rigours of winter, and make the whole masque of the seasons a pageant

and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the

harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the

emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of loveliness; and the bitter

laugh over the empty casket of Pandora[8] comes from a heart wrung

with the sorrow that beauty is less strong than time. Nor is the

burden of these poems only that pleasant things decay; rather that in

nothing good or bad, rich or mean, is there permanence or certitude,

but everywhere and without selection Time feeds oblivion with decay of

things. All things flow and nothing abides; shape and name, nature and

fortune yield to the dissolving touch of time.[9]

Even then the world was old. The lamentations over decayed towns and

perished empires remind us that the distance which separates the age

of the Caesars from our own is in relation to human history merely a

chapter somewhere in the middle of a great volume. Then, no less than

now, men trod daily over the ruins of old civilisations and the

monuments of lost races. One of the most striking groups of poems in

the Anthology is the long roll of the burdens of dead cities; Troy,

Delos, Mycenae, Argos, Amphipolis, Corinth, Sparta.[10] The

depopulation of Greece brought with it a foreshadowing of the wreck of

the whole ancient world. With the very framework of human life giving

way daily before their eyes, men grew apt to give up the game. The

very instability of all things, once established as a law, brought a

sort of rest and permanence with it; "there is nothing strictly

immutable," they might have said, "but mutability." Thus the law of

change became a permanent thread in mortal affairs, and, with the

knowledge that all the old round would be gone over again by others,

grew the sense that in the acceptance of this law of nature there was

involved a conquest of nature, an overcoming of the world.

For the strength of Fate was not otherwise to be contended with, and

its grim irony went deeper than human reach. Nemesis was merciless; an

error was punished like a crime, and the more confident you had been

that you were right, the most severe was the probable penalty. But it

was part of Fate's malignity that, though the offender was punished,

though Justice took care that her own interests were not neglected nor

her own majesty slighted, even where a humane judge would have shrunk

from inflicting a disproportionate penalty,[11] yet for the wronged

one himself she provided no remedy; he suffered at his own risk. For

falseness in friendship, for scorn of poverty, for wanton cruelty and

torture, the wheel of fortune brought round some form of retribution,

but the sufferers were like pieces swept off the board, once and for

all.

And Fate seemed to take a positive pleasure in eluding anticipation

and constructing dramatic surprises. Through all Greek literature this

feeling shows itself; and later epigrams are full of incidents of this

sort, recounted and moralised over with the wearisomeness of a tract,

stories sometimes obviously invented with an eye to the moral,

sometimes merely silly, sometimes, though rarely, becoming

imaginative. The contrast of a youth without means to indulge its

appetites and an age without appetites to exhaust its means; the story

of the poor man who found treasure and the rich man who hanged

himself; the fable of the vine's revenge upon the goat, are typical

instances of the prosaic epigram.[12] The noble lines inscribed upon

the statue of Memnon at Thebes[13] are an example of the vivid

imaginative touch lighting up a sufficiently obvious theme for the

rhetorician. Under the walls of Troy, long ages past, the son of Dawn

had fallen under Achilles' terrible spear; yet now morning by morning

the goddess salutes her son and he makes answer, while Thetis is

childless in her sea-halls, and the dust of Achilles moulders silently

in the Trojan plain. The Horatian maxim of /nulli satis cautum/ recurs

in the story of the ship, that had survived its sea-perils, burnt at

last as it lay on shore near its native forest, and finding the ocean

less faithless than the land.[14] In a different vein is the sarcastic

praise of Fortune for her exaltation of a worthless man to high

honour, "that she might shew her omnipotence."[15] At the root of all

there is the sense, born of considering the flux of things and the

tyranny of time, that man plays a losing game, and that his only

success is in refusing to play. For the busy and idle, for the

fortunate and unhappy alike, the sun rises one morning for the last

time;[16] he only is to be congratulated who is done with hope and

fear;[17] how short-lived soever he be in comparison with the world

through which he passes, yet no less through time Fate dries up the

holy springs, and the mighty cities of old days are undecipherable

under the green turf;[18] it is the only wisdom to acquiesce in the

forces, however ignorant or malign in their working, that listen to no

protest and admit no appeal, that no force can affect, no subtlety

elude, no calculation predetermine.

----------

[1] {to theion pan phthoneron te kai tarakhodes}, Hdt. i. 32.

[2] Anth. Pal. v. 74, 118.

[3] Ibid. xi. 53; xii. 32, 234.

[4] Anth. Pal. vii. 472.

[5] Ibid. xi. 25; xii. 50.

[6] Ibid. v. 85.

[7] Ibid. xi. 37.

[8] Ibid. x. 71.

[9] Ibid. ix. 51.

[10] Ibid. vii. 705, 723; ix. 28, 101-4, 151-6, 408.

[11] Anth. Pal. ix. 269.

[12] Ibid. ix. 138, 44, 75.

[13] ix. 19 in this selection.

[14] Anth. Pal. ix. 106.

[15] Ibid. ix. 530.

[16] Ibid. ix. 8.

[17] Ibid. ix. 172; xi. 282.

[18] Ibid. ix. 101, 257.

XIV

Of these prodigious natural forces the strongest and the most imposing

is Death. Here, if anywhere, the Greek genius had its fullest scope

and most decisive triumph; and here it is that we come upon the

epigram in its inmost essence and utmost perfection. "Waiting to see

the end" as it always did, the Greek spirit pronounced upon the end

when it came with a swiftness, a tact, a certitude that leave all

other language behind. For although Latin and not Greek is

pre-eminently and without rival the proper and, one might almost say,

the native language of monumental inscription, yet the little

difference that fills inscriptions with imagination and beauty, and

will not be content short of poetry, is in the Greek temper alone. The

Roman sarcophagus, square hewn of rock, and bearing on it, incised for

immortality, the haughty lines of rolling Republican names, represents

to us with unequalled power the abstract majesty of human States and

the glory of law and government; and the momentary pause in the steady

current of the life of Rome, when one citizen dropped out of rank and

another succeeded him, brings home to us with crushing effect, like

some great sentence of Tacitus, the brief and transitory worth of a

single life. /Qui apicem gessisti, mors perfecit tua ut essent omnia

brevia, honos fama virtusque, gloria atque ingenium/[1]--words like

these have a melancholy majesty that no other human speech has known;

nor can any greater depth of pathos be reached than is in the two

simple words /Bene merenti/ on a hundred Roman tombs. But the Greek

mind here as elsewhere came more directly than any other face to face

with the truth of things, and the Greek genius kindled before the

vision of life and death into a clearer flame. The sepulchural reliefs

show us many aspects of death; in all of the best period there is a

common note, mingled of a grave tenderness, simplicity, and reserve.

The quiet figures there take leave of one another with the same grace

that their life had shown. There is none of the horror of darkness,

none of the ugliness of dying; with calm faces and undisordered

raiment they rise from their seats and take the last farewell. But the

sepulchural verses show us more clearly how deep the grief was that

lay beneath the quiet lines of the marble and the smooth cadence of

the couplets. They cover and fill the whole range of emotion:

household grief, and pain for the dead baby or the drowned lover, and

the bitter parting of wife and husband, and the chill of distance and

the doubt of the unknown nether world; and the thoughts of the bright

and brief space of life, and the merciless continuity of nature, and

the resolution of body and soul into the elements from which they

came; and the uselessness of Death's impatience, and the bitter cry of

a life gone like spilt water; and again, comfort out of the grave,

perpetual placidity, "holy sleep," and earth's gratitude to her

children, and beyond all, dimly and lightly drawn, the flowery meadows

of Persephone, the great simplicity and rest of the other world, and

far away a shadowy and beautiful country to which later men were to

give the name of Heaven.

The famous sepulchral epigrams of Simonides deserve a word to

themselves; for in them, among the most finished achievements of the

greatest period of Greece, the art not only touches its highest

recorded point, but a point beyond which it seems inconceivable that

art should go. They stand with the odes of Pindar and the tragedies of

Sophocles as the symbols of perfection in literature; not only from

the faultlessness of their form, but from their greatness of spirit,

the noble and simple thought that had then newly found itself so

perfect a language to commemorate the great deeds which it inspired.

Foremost among them are those on the men whose fame they can hardly

exalt beyond the place given them by history; on the three hundred of

Thermopylae, the Athenian dead at Marathon, the Athenian and

Lacedaemonian dead at Plataea.[2] "O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians

that we lie here obeying their orders"--the words have grown so famous

that it is only by sudden flashes that we can appreciate their

greatness. No less noble are others somewhat less widely known: on the

monument erected by the city of Corinth to the men who, when all

Greece stood as near destruction as a knife's edge, helped to win her

freedom at Salamis; on the Athenians, slain under the skirts of the

Euboean hills, who lavished their young and beautiful lives for

Athens; on the soldiers who fell, in the full tide of the Greek glory,

at the great victory of the Eurymedon.[3] In all the epitaphs of this

class the thought of the city swallows up individual feeling; for the

city's sake, that she may be free and great, men offer their death as

freely as their life; and the noblest end for a life spent in her

service is to die in the moment of her victory. The funeral speech of

Pericles dwells with all the amplitude of rhetoric on the glory of

such a death; "having died they are not dead" are the simpler words of

Simonides.[4]

Not less striking than these in their high simplicity are his epitaphs

on private persons: that which preserves the fame of the great lady

who was not lifted up to pride, Archedice daughter of Hippias; that on

Theognis of Sinope, so piercing and yet so consoling in its quiet

pathos, or that on Brotachus of Gortyn, the trader who came after

merchandise and found death; the dying words of Timomachus and the

eternal memory left to his father day by day of the goodness and

wisdom of his dead child; the noble apostrophe to mount Gerania, where

the drowned and nameless sailor met his doom, the first and one of the

most magnificent of the long roll of poems on seafarers lost at

sea.[5] In all of them the foremost quality is their simplicity of

statement. There are no superlatives. The emotion is kept strictly in

the background, neither expressed nor denied. Great minds of later

ages sought a justification of the ways of death in denying that it

brought any reasonable grief. To the cold and profound thought of

Marcus Aurelius death is "a natural thing, like roses in spring or

harvest in autumn."[6] But these are the words of a strange language.

The feeling of Simonides is not, like theirs, abstract and remote; he

offers no justification, because none is felt to be needed where the

pain of death is absorbed in the ardour of life.

That great period passed away; and in those which follow it, the

sepulchural inscription, while it retains the old simplicity, descends

from those heights into more common feelings, lets loose emotion, even

dallies with the ornaments of grief. The sorrow of death is spoken of

freely; nor is there any poetry more pathetic than those epitaphs

which, lovely in their sadness, commemorate the lost child, the

sundered lovers, the disunited life. Among the most beautiful are

those on children: on the baby that just lived, and, liking it not,

went away again before it had known good or evil;[7] on the children

of a house all struck down in one day and buried in one grave;[8] on

the boy whom his parents could not keep, though they held both his

little hands in theirs, led downward by the Angel of Death to the

unsmiling land.[9] Then follows the keener sadness of the young life,

spared till it opened into flower only to be cut down before noon; the

girl who, sickening for her baby-brother, lost care for her playmates,

and found no peace till she went to rejoin him;[10] the boy of twelve,

with whom his father, adding no words of lamentation, lays his whole

hope in the grave;[11] the cry of the mourning mother over her son,

Bianor or Anticles, an only child laid on the funeral pyre before an

only parent's eyes, leaving dawn thenceforth disadorned of her

sweetness, and no comfort in the sun.[12] More piercing still in their

sad sweetness are the epitaphs on young wives; on Anastasia, dead at

sixteen, in the first year of her marriage, over whom the ferryman of

the dead must needs mingle his own with her father's and her husband's

tears; on Atthis of Cnidos, the wife who had never left her husband

till this the first and last sundering came; on Paulina of Ravenna,

holy of life and blameless, the young bride of the physician whose

skill could not save her, but whose last testimony to her virtues has

survived the wreck of the centuries that have made the city crumble

and the very sea retire.[13] The tender feeling for children mingles

with the bitter grief at their loss, a touch of fancy, as though they

were flowers plucked by Persephone to be worn by her and light up the

greyness of the underworld. Cleodicus, dead before the festival of

this third birthday, when the child's hair was cut and he became a

boy, lies in his little coffin; but somewhere by unknown Acheron a

shadow of him grows fair and strong in youth, though he never may

return to earth again.[14]

With the grief for loss comes the piercing cry over crushed beauty.

One of the early epitaphs, written before the period of the Persian

wars, is nothing but this cry: "pity him who was so beautiful and is

dead."[15] In the same spirit is the fruitless appeal so often made

over the haste of Death; /mais que te nuysoit elle en vie, mort?/ Was

he not thine, even had he died an old man? says the mourner over

Attalus.[16] A subject whose strange fascination drew artist after

artist to repeat it, and covered the dreariness of death as with a

glimmer of white blossoms, was Death the Bridegroom, the maiden taken

away from life just as it was about to be made complete. Again and

again the motive is treated with delicate profusion of detail, and

lingering fancy draws out the sad likeness between the two torches

that should hold such a space of lovely life between them,[17] now

crushed violently together and mingling their fires. Already the

bride-bed was spread with saffron in the gilded chamber; already the

flutes were shrill by the doorway, and the bridal torches were lit,

when Death entered, masked as a reveller, and the hymeneal song

suddenly changed into the death-dirge; and while the kinsfolk were

busy about another fire, Persephone lighted her own torch out of their

hands; with hardly an outward change--as in a processional relief on a

sarcophagus--the bridal train turns and moves to the grave with

funeral lights flaring through the darkness and sobbing voices and

wailing flutes.[18]

As tender in their fancy and with a higher note of sincerity in their

grief are the epitaphs on young mothers, dead in childbirth: Athenaïs

of Lesbos, the swift-footed, whose cry Artemis was too busy with her

woodland hounds to hear; Polyxena, wife of Archelus, not a year's wife

nor a month's mother, so short was all her time; Prexo, wife of

Theocritus, who takes her baby with her, content with this, and gives

blessings from her grave to all who will pray with her that the boy

she leaves on earth may live into a great old age.[19] Here tenderness

outweighs sorrow; in others a bitterer grief is uttered, the grief of

one left alone, forsaken and cast off by all that had made life sweet;

where the mother left childless among women has but the one prayer

left, that she too may quickly go whence she came, or where the morbid

imagination of a mourner over many deaths invents new forms of self-

torture in the idea that her very touch is mortal to those whom she

loves, and that fate has made her the instrument of its cruelty; or

where Theano, dying alone in Phocaea, sends a last cry over the great

gulfs of sea that divide her from her husband, and goes down into the

night with the one passionate wish that she might have but died with

her hand clasped in his hand.[20]

Into darkness, into silence: the magnificent brilliance of that

ancient world, its fulness of speech and action, its copiousness of

life, made the contrast more sudden and appalling; and it seems to be

only at a later period, when the brightness was a little dimmed and

the tide of life did not run so full, that the feeling grew up which

regarded death as the giver of rest. With a last word of greeting to

the bright earth the dying man departs, as into a mist.[21] In the

cold shadows underground the ghost will not be comforted by ointments

and garlands lavished on the tomb; though the clay covering be

drenched with wine, the dead man will not drink.[22] On an island of

the Aegean, set like a gem in the splendid sea, the boy lying under

earth, far away from the sweet sun, asks a word of pity from those who

go up and down, busy in the daylight, past his grave. Paula of

Tarentum, the brief-fated, cries out passionately of the stone

chambers of her night, the night that has hidden her. Samian girls set

up a monument over their playfellow Crethis, the chatterer, the story-

teller, whose lips will never open in speech again. Musa, the singing-

girl, blue-eyed and sweet-voiced, suddenly lies voiceless, like a

stone.[23] With a jarring shock, as of closed gates, the grave closes

over sound and colour; /moved round in Earth's diurnal course with

rocks, and stones, and trees./

Even thus there is some little comfort in lying under known earth; and

the strangeness of a foreign grave adds a last touch to the pathos of

exile. The Eretrians, captured by the Persian general Datis, and sent

from their island home by endless marches into the heart of Asia, pine

in the hot Cassian plains, and with their last voice from the tomb

send out a greeting to the dear and distant sea.[24] The Athenian laid

in earth by the far reaches of Nile, and the Egyptian whose tomb

stands by a village of Crete, though from all places the descent to

the house of Hades is one, yet grieve and fret at their strange

resting-places.[25] No bitterer pang can be added to death than for

the white bones of the dead to lie far away, washed by chill rains, or

mouldering on a strange beach with the screaming seagulls above

them.[26]

This last aspect of death was the one upon which the art of the

epigrammatist lavished its utmost resources. From first to last the

Greeks were a seafaring people, and death at sea was always present to

them as a common occurrence. The Mediterranean was the great highway

of the world's journeying and traffic. All winter through, travel

almost ceased on it except for those who could not avoid it, and whom

desire or gain or urgence of business drove forth across stormy and

perilous waters; with spring there came, year by year, a sort of

breaking-up of the frost, and the seas were all at once covered with a

swarm of shipping. From Egypt and Syria fleets bore the produce of the

East westward; from the pillars of Hercules galleys came laden with

the precious ores of Spain and Britain; through the Propontis streamed

the long convoys of corn-ships from the Euxine with their loads of

wheat. Across the Aegean from island to island, along its shores from

port to port, ran continually the tide of local commerce, the crowds

of tourists and emigrants, the masses of people and merchandise drawn

hither and thither in the track of armies, or bound to and from shows

and festivals and markets. The fishing industry, at least in the later

Greek period, employed the whole population of small islands and

seaside towns. Among those thousands of vessels many must, every year,

have come to harm in those difficult channels and treacherous seas.

And death at sea had a great horror and anguish attached to it; the

engulfing in darkness, the vain struggles for life, the loss of burial

rites and all the last offices that can be paid to death, made it none

the less terrible that it was so common. From the Odyssey downward

tales of sea-peril and shipwreck had the most powerful fascination.

Yet to that race of sailors the sea always remained in a manner

hateful; "as much as a mother is sweeter than a stepmother," says

Antipater,[27] "so much is earth dearer than the dark sea." The

fisherman tossing on the waves looked back with envy to the shepherd,

who, though his life was no less hard, could sit in quiet piping to

his flock on the green hillside; the great merchantman who crossed the

whole length of the Mediterranean on his traffic, or even ventured out

beyond Calpe into the unknown ocean, hungered for the peace of broad

lands, the lowing of herds.[28] /Cedet et ipse mari vector, nec

nautica pinus mutabit merces/: all dreams of a golden age, or of an

ideal life in an actual world, included in them the release from this

weary and faithless element. Even in death it would not allow its

victims rest; the cry of the drowned man is that though kind hands

have given him burial on the beach, even there the ceaseless thunder

of the surge is in his ears, and the roar of the surf under the broken

reef will not let him be quiet; "keep back but twelve feet from me,"

is his last prayer, "and there billow and roar as much as thou

wilt."[29] But even the grace of a tomb was often denied. In the

desolation of unknown distances the sailor sank into the gulfs or was

flung on a desert beach. Erasippus, perished with his ship, has all

the ocean for his grave; somewhere far away his white bones moulder on

a spot that the seagulls alone can tell. Thymodes rears a cenotaph to

his son, who on some Bithynian beach or island of the Pontic lies a

naked corpse on an inhospitable shore. Young Seleucus, wrecked in the

distant Atlantic, has long been dead on the trackless Spanish coasts,

while yet at home in Lesbos they praise him and look forward to his

return. On the thirsty uplands of Dryopia the empty earth is heaped up

that does not cover Polymedes, tossed up and down far from stony

Trachis on the surge of the Icarian sea. "Also thee, O Cleanoridas,"

one abruptly opens, the thought of all those many others whom the sea

had swallowed down overwhelming him as he tells the fate of the

drowned man.[30] The ocean never forgot its cruelty. {Pasa thalassa

thalassa}, "everywhere the sea is the sea," wails Aristagoras,[31]

past the perilous Cyclades and the foaming narrows of the Hellespont

only to be drowned in a little Locrian harbour; the very sound of the

words echoes the heavy wash of blind waves and the hissing of eternal

foam. Already in sight of home, like Odysseus on his voyage from

Aeolia, the sailor says to himself, "to-morrow the long battle against

contrary winds will be over," when the storm gathers as the words

leave his lips, and he is swept back to death.[32] The rash mariner

who trusts the gale of winter draws fate on himself with his own

hands; Cleonicus, hastening home to Thasos with his merchandise from

Hollow Syria at the setting of the Pleiad, sinks with the sinking

star.[33] But even in the days of the halcyons, when the sea should

stand like a sheet of molten glass, the terrible straits swallow

Aristomenes, with ship and crew; and Nicophemus perishes, not in

wintry waves, but of thirst in a calm on the smooth and merciless

Lybian sea.[34] By harbours and headlands stood the graves of drowned

men with pathetic words of warning or counsel. "I am the tomb of one

shipwrecked"; in these words again and again the verses begin. What

follows is sometimes an appeal to others to take example: "let him

have only his own hardihood to blame, who looses moorings from my

grave"; sometimes it is a call to courage: "I perished; yet even then

other ships sailed safely on." Another, in words incomparable for

their perfect pathos and utter simplicity, neither counsels nor warns:

"O mariners, well be with you at sea and on land; but know that you

pass the tomb of a shipwrecked man." And in the same spirit another

sends a blessing out of his nameless tomb: "O sailor, ask not whose

grave I am, but be thine own fortune a kinder sea."[35]

Beyond this simplicity and pathos cannot reach. But there is a group

of three epigrams yet unmentioned[36] which, in their union of these

qualities with the most severe magnificence of language and with the

poignant and vivid emotion of a tragical Border ballad, reach an even

more amazing height: that where Ariston of Cyrene, lying dead by the

Icarian rocks, cries out in passionate urgency on mariners who go

sailing by to tell Meno how his son perished; that where the tomb of

Biton in the morning sun, under the walls of Torone, sends a like

message by the traveller to the childless father, Nicagoras of

Amphipolis; and most piercing of all in their sorrow and most splendid

in their cadences, the stately lines that tell the passer-by of

Polyanthus, sunk off Sciathus in the stormy Aegean, and laid in his

grave by the young wife to whom only a dead body was brought home by

the fishermen as they sailed into harbour under a flaring and windy

dawn.

Less numerous than these poems of sea-sorrow, but with the same

trouble of darkness, the same haunting chill, are others where death

comes through the gloom of wet nights, in the snowstorm or the

thunderstorm or the autumn rains that drown the meadow and swell the

ford. The contrast of long golden summer days may perhaps make the

tidings of death more pathetic, and wake a more delicate pity; but the

physical horror, as in the sea-pieces, is keener at the thought of

lonely darkness, and storm in the night. Few pictures can be more

vivid than that of the oxen coming unherded down the hill through the

heavy snow at dusk, while high on the mountain side their master lies

dead, struck by lightning; or of Ion, who slipped overboard, unnoticed

in the darkness, while the sailors drank late into night at their

anchorage; or of the strayed revellers, Orthon and Polyxenus, who,

bewildered in the rainy night, with the lights of the banquet still

flaring in their eyes, stumbled on the slippery hill-path and lay dead

at the foot of the cliff.[37]

/O Charides, what is there beneath?/ cries a passer-by over the grave

of one who had in life nursed his hopes on the doctrine of Pythagoras;

and out of the grave comes the sombre answer, /Great darkness/.[38] It

is in this feeling that the brooding over death in later Greek

literature issues; under the Roman empire we feel that we have left

the ancient world and are on the brink of the Middle Ages with their

half hysterical feeling about death, the piteous and ineffectual

revolt against it, and the malign fascination with which it preys on

men's minds and paralyses their action. To the sombre imagination of

an exhausted race the generations of mankind were like bands of

victims dragged one after another to the slaughter-house; in Palladas

and his contemporaries the medieval dance of death is begun.[39] The

great and simple view of death is wholly broken up, with the usual

loss and gain that comes of analysis. On the one hand is developed

this tremulous and cowardly shrinking from the law of nature. But on

the other there arises in compensation the view of death as final

peace, the release from trouble, the end of wandering, the resolution

of the feverous life of man into the placid and continuous life of

nature. With a great loss of strength and directness comes an

increased measure of gentleness and humanity. Poetry loves to linger

over the thought of peaceful graves. The dead boy's resting-place by

the spring under the poplars bids the weary wayfarer turn aside and

drink in the shade, and remember the quiet place when he is far

away.[40] The aged gardener lies at peace under the land that he had

laboured for many a year, and in recompence of his fruitful toil over

vine and olive, corn-field and orchard-plot, grateful earth lies

lightly over his grey temples, and the earliest flowers of spring

blossom above his dust.[41] The lovely lines of Leonidas,[42] in which

Clitagoras asks that when he is dead the sheep may bleat over him, and

the shepherd pipe from the rock as they graze softly along the valley,

and that the countryman in spring may pluck a posy of meadow flowers

and lay it on his grave, have all the tenderness of an English

pastoral in a land of soft outlines and silvery tones. An intenser

feeling for nature and a more consoling peace is in the nameless poem

that bids the hill-brooks and the cool upland pastures tell the bees,

when they go forth anew on their flowery way, that their old keeper

fell asleep on a winter night, and will not come back with spring.[43]

The lines call to mind that magnificent passage of the /Adonais/ where

the thought of earth's annual resurrection calms by its glory and

beauty the very sorrow which it rekindles; as those others, where,

since the Malian fowler is gone, the sweet plane again offers her

branches "for the holy bird to rest his swift wings,"[44] are echoed

in the famous Ode where the note of the immortal bird sets the

listener in the darkness at peace with Death. The dying man leaves

earth with a last kind word. At rest from long wanderings, the woman,

whose early memory went back to the storming of Athens by Roman

legionaries, and whose later life had passed from Italy to Asia,

unites the lands of her birth and adoption and decease in her

farewell.[45] For all ranks and ages--the baby gone to be a flower in

Persephone's crowned hair, the young scholar, dear to men and dearer

to the Muses, the great sage who, from the seclusion of his

Alexandrian library, has seen three kings succeed to the throne[46]--

the recompense of life is peace. Peace is on the graves of the good

servant, the faithful nurse, the slave who does not even in the tomb

forget his master's kindness or cease to help him at need.[47] Even

the pets of the household, the dog or the singing-bird, or the caged

cricket shouting through the warm day, have their reward in death,

their slight memorial and their lasting rest. The shrill cicala,

silent and no more looked on by the sun, finds a place in the meadows

whose flowers the Queen of the Dead herself keeps bright with dew.[48]

The sweet-throated song-bird, the faithful watch-dog who kept the

house from harm, the speckled partridge in the coppice,[49] go at the

appointed time upon their silent way--/ipsas angusti terminus aevi

excipit/--and come into human sympathy because their bright life is

taken to its rest like man's own in so brief a term.

Before this gentler view of death grief itself becomes softened. "Fare

thou well even in the house of Hades," says the friend over the grave

of the friend: the words are the same as those of Achilles over

Patroclus, but all the wild anguish has gone out of them.[50] Over the

ashes of Theognis of Sinope, without a word of sorrow, with hardly a

pang of pain, Glaucus sets a stone in memory of the companionship of

many years. And in the tenderest and most placid of epitaphs on dead

friends doubt vanishes with grief and acquiescence passes into hope,

as the survivor of that union "which conquers Time indeed, and is

eternal, separate from fears," prays Sabinus, if it be permitted, not

even among the dead to let the severing water of Lethe pass his

lips.[51]

Out of peace comes the fruit of blessing. The drowned sailor rests the

easier in his grave that the lines written over it bid better fortune

to others who adventure the sea. "Go thou upon thy business and obtain

thy desire,"[52] says the dead man to the passer-by, and the kind word

makes the weight of his own darkness less to bear. Amazonia of

Thessalonica from her tomb bids husband and children cease their

lamentations and be only glad while they remember her.[53] Such

recompence is in death that the dead sailor or shepherd becomes

thenceforth the genius of the shore or the hillside.[54] The sacred

sleep under earth sends forth a vague and dim effluence; in a sort of

trance between life and death the good still are good and do not

wholly cease out of being.[55]

For the doctrine of immortality did not dawn upon the world at any

single time or from any single quarter. We are accustomed, perhaps, to

think of it as though it came like sunrise out of the dark, /lux

sedentibus in tenebris/, giving a new sense to mankind and throwing

over the whole breadth of life a vivid severance of light from shadow,

putting colour and sharp form into what had till then all lain dim in

the dusk, like Virgil's woodland path under the glimpses of a fitful

moon. Rather it may be compared to those scattered lights that

watchers from Mount Ida were said to discern moving hither and thither

in the darkness, and at last slowly gathering and kindling into the

clear pallor of dawn.[56] So it is that those half-formed beliefs,

those hints and longings, still touch us with the freshness of our own

experience. For the ages of faith, if such there be, have not yet

come; still in the mysterious glimmer of a doubtful light men wait for

the coming of the unrisen sun. During a brief and brilliant period the

splendour of corporate life had absorbed the life of the citizen; an

Athenian of the age of Pericles may have, for the moment, found Athens

all-sufficient to his needs. With the decay of that glory it became

plain that this single life was insufficient, that it failed in

permanence and simplicity. We all dwell in a single native country,

the universe, said Meleager,[57] expressing a feeling that had become

the common heritage of his race. But that country, as men saw it, was

but ill governed; and in nothing more so than in the rewards and

punishments it gave to its citizens. To regard it as the vestibule

only of another country where life should have its intricacies

simplified, its injustices remedied, its evanescent beauty fixed, and

its brief joy made full, became an imperious instinct that claimed

satisfaction, through definite religious teaching or the dreams of

philosophy or the visions of poetry. And so the last words of Greek

sepulchral poetry express, through questions and doubts, in metaphor

and allegory, the final belief in some blessedness beyond death. Who

knows whether to live be not death, and to be dead life? so the

haunting hope begins. The Master of the Portico died young; does he

sleep in the quiet embrace of earth, or live in the joy of the other

world?[58] "Even in life what makes each one of us to be what we are

is only the soul; and when we are dead, the bodies of the dead are

rightly said to be our shades or images; for the true and immortal

being of each one of us, which is called the soul, goes on her way to

other gods, that before them she may give an account."[59] These are

the final words left to men by that superb and profound genius the

dream of whose youth had ended in the flawless lines[60] whose music

Shelley's own could scarcely render:

Thou wert the Morning Star among the living

Ere thy fair light was fled;

Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving

New splendour to the dead.

And at last, not from the pen of Plato nor written in lines of gold,

but set by a half-forgotten friend over an obscure grave,[61] comes

the certitude of that long hope. Heliodorus and Diogeneia died on the

same day and are buried under the same stone: but love admits no such

bar to its continuance, and the tomb is as a bridal chamber for their

triumphant life.

----------

[1] From the inscription on the tomb of Publius Cornelius Scipio

Africanus, Augur and Flamen Dialis, son of the conqueror of

Hannibal.

[2] Anth. Pal. vii. 249, 251, 253; Aristides, ii. 511.

[3] Aristides, ii. 512; App. Plan. 26; Anth. Pal. vii. 258.

[4] Anth. Pal. vii. 251; Thuc. ii. 41-43.

[5] Thuc. vi. 59; Anth. Pal. vii. 509, 254, 513, 496.

[6] Marc. Aur. iv. 44.

[7] Kaibel, 576.

[8] Anth. Pal. vii. 474.

[9] iii. 33 in this selection.

[10] Anth. Pal. vii. 662.

[11] Ibid. vii. 453.

[12] Ibid. vii. 261, 466.

[13] Ibid. vii. 600; Kaibel, 204 B, 596.

[14] Anth. Pal. vii. 482, 483.

[15] Kaibel, 1 A.

[16] Anth. Pal. vii. 671.

[17] Propertius, IV. xii. 46.

[18] Anth. Pal. vii. 182, 185, 711, 712.

[19] Ibid. vi. 438, vii. 167, 163.

[20] Ibid. vii. 466, ix. 254, vii. 735.

[21] Anth. Pal. vii. 566.

[22] Ibid. xi. 8.

[23] Kaibel, 190; Anth. Pal. vii. 700, 459; C. I. G., 6261.

[24] Anth. Pal. vii. 256, 259.

[25] Ibid. vii. 477, x. 3.

[26] Ibid. vii. 225, 285.

[27] Anth. Pal. ix. 23.

[28] Anth. Pal. vii. 636, ix. 7; cf. Virgil, Georg. ii. 468-70.

[29] Ibid. vii. 284.

[30] Ibid. vii. 285, 497, 376, 651, 263.

[31] Ibid. vii. 639.

[32] Ibid. vii. 630.

[33] Anth. Pal. vii. 263, 534.

[34] Ibid. ix. 271, vii. 293.

[35] Ibid. vii. 264, 282, 675; 269, 350.

[36] Ibid. vii. 499, 502, 739.

[37] Anth. Pal. vii. 173, ix. 82, vii. 398, 660.

[38] Ibid. vii. 524.

[39] Cf. Ibid. x. 78, 85, 88, xi. 300.

[40] Anth. Pal. ix. 315.

[41] Ibid. vii. 321.

[42] Ibid. vii. 657. The spirit, and much of the language, of these

epigrams is very like that of Gray's /Elegy/.

[43] Ibid. vii. 717.

[44] Ibid. vii. 171.

[45] Ibid. vii. 368.

[46] Anth. Pal. 78, 483; Diog. Laert. iv. 25.

[47] Ibid. vii. 178, 179; Kaibel, 47.

[48] Ibid. vii. 189.

[49] Ibid. vii. 199, 211, 203.

[50] Il. xxiii. 19; Anth. Pal. vii. 41.

[51] Ibid. vii. 509, 346.

[52] Kaibel, 190.

[53] Anth. Pal. vii. 667.

[54] Ibid. vii. 269, 657.

[55] Ibid. vii. 451.

[56] Lucr. v. 663.

[57] Anth. Pal. vii. 417.

[58] Infra, xi. 7.

[59] Plato, /Laws/, 959.

[60] Anth. Pal. vii. 670.

[61] Ibid. vii. 378, {agallomenoi kai taphon os thalamon}.

XV

Criticism, to be made effectively, must be made from beyond and

outside the thing criticised. But as regards life itself, such an

effort of abstraction is more than human. For the most part poetry

looks on life from a point inside it, and the total view differs, or

may even be reversed, with the position of the observer. The shifting

of perspective makes things appear variously both in themselves and in

their proportion to other things. What lies behind one person is

before another; the less object, if nearer, may eclipse the greater;

where there is no fixed standard of reference, how can it be

determined what is real and what apparent, or whether there be any

absolute fact at all? To some few among men it has been granted to

look on life as it were from without, with vision unaffected by the

limit of view and the rapid shifting of place. These, the poets who

see life steadily and whole, in Matthew Arnold's celebrated phrase,

are for the rest of mankind almost divine. We recognise them as such

through a sort of instinct awakened by theirs and responding to it,

through the inarticulate divinity of which we are all in some degree

partakers.

These are the great poets; and we do not look, in any Anthology of

slight and fugitive pieces, for so broad and sustained a view of life.

But what we do find in the Anthology is the reflection in many

epigrams of many partial criticisms from within; the expression, in

the most brief and pointed form, of the total effect that life had on

one man or another at certain moments, whether in the heat of blood,

or the first melancholy of youth, or the graver regard of mature

years. In nearly all the same sad note recurs, of the shortness of

life, of the inevitableness of death. Now death is the shadow at the

feast, bidding men make haste to drink before the cup is snatched from

their lips with its sweetness yet undrained; again it is the

bitterness within the cup itself, the lump of salt dissolving in the

honeyed wine and spoiling the drink. Then comes the revolt against the

cruel law of Nature in the crude thought of undisciplined minds.

Sometimes this results in hard cynicism, sometimes in the relaxation

of all effort; now and then the bitterness grows so deep that it

almost takes the quality of a real philosophy, a nihilism, to use the

barbarous term of our own day, that declares itself as a positive

solution of the whole problem. "Little is the life of our rejoicing,"

cries Rufinus,[1] in the very words of an English ballad of the

fifteenth century; "old age comes quickly, and death ends all." In

many epigrams this burden is repeated. The philosophy is that of

Ecclesiastes: "Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine

with a merry heart, let thy garments be always white, and let thy head

lack no ointment; see life with the wife whom thou lovest all the days

of the life of thy vanity; for that is thy portion in life, and in thy

labour which thou takest under the sun." If the irony here is

unintentional it is all the bitterer; such consolation leads surely to

a more profound gloom. With a selfish nature this view of life becomes

degraded into cynical effrontery; under the Roman empire the lowest

corruption of "good manners" took for its motto the famous words,

repeated in an anonymous epigram,[2] Let us eat and drink, for

to-morrow we die. In finer tempers it issues in a mood strangely

mingled of weakness of will and lucidity of intelligence, like that of

Omar Khayyam. Many of the stanzas of the Persian poet have a close

parallel, not only in thought but in actual turn of phrase, in verses

of the later epigrammatists.[3] The briefness of life when first

realised makes youth feverish and self-absorbed. "Other men perhaps

will be, but /I/ shall be dead and turned into black earth"--as though

that were the one thing of importance.[4] Or again, the beauty of

returning spring is felt in the blood as an imperious call to renew

the delight in the simplest physical pleasures, food and scent of

flowers and walks in the fresh country air, and to thrust away the

wintry thought of dead friends who cannot share those delights now.[5]

The earliest form taken by the instinct of self-preservation and the

revolt against death can hardly be called by a milder name than

swaggering. "I don't care," the young man cries,[6] with a sort of

faltering bravado. Snatch the pleasure of the moment, such is the

selfish instinct of man before his first imagination of life, and

then, and then let fate do its will upon you.[7] Thereafter, as the

first turbulence of youth passes, its first sadness succeeds, with the

thought of all who have gone before and all who are to follow, and of

the long night of silence under the ground. Touches of tenderness

break in upon the reveller; thoughts of the kinship of earth, as the

drinker lifts the sweet cup wrought of the same clay as he; submission

to the lot of mortality; counsels to be generous while life lasts, "to

give and to share"; the renunciation of gross ambitions such as wealth

and power, with some likeness or shadow in it of the crowning virtue

of humility.[8]

It is here that the change begins. To renounce something for the first

time wittingly and spontaneously is an action of supreme importance,

and its consequences reach over the whole of life. Not only is it that

he who has renounced one thing has shown himself implicitly capable of

renouncing all things: he has shown much more; reflection, choice,

will. Thenceforth he is able to see part of life at all events from

outside, the part which he has put away from himself; for the first

time his criticism of life begins to be real. He has no longer a mere

feeling with regard to the laws of nature, whether eager haste or

sullen submission or blind revolt; behind the feeling there is now

thought, the power which makes and unmakes all things.

And so in mature age Greek thought began to make criticisms on life;

and of these the Anthology preserves and crystallises many brilliant

fragments. Perhaps there is no thought among them which was even then

original; certainly there is none which is not now more or less

familiar. But the perfected expression without which thought remains

obscure and ineffectual gives some of them a value as enduring as

their charm. A few of them are here set side by side without comment,

for no comment is needed to make their sense clear, nor to give weight

to their grave and penetrating reality.[9]

"Those who have left the sweet light I mourn no longer, but those who

live in perpetual expectation of death."

"What belongs to mortals is mortal, and all things pass by us; and if

not, yet we pass by them."

"Now we flourish, as others did before, and others will presently,

whose children we shall not see."

"I weep not for thee, dearest friend; for thou knewest much good; and

likewise God dealt thee thy share of ill."

These epigrams in their clear and unimpassioned brevity are a type of

the Greek temper in the age of reflection. Many others, less simple in

their language, less crystalline in their structure, have the same

quiet sadness in their tone. As it is said in the solemn and

monumental line of Menander, sorrow and life are too surely akin.[10]

The vanity of earthly labour; the deep sorrow over the passing of

youth; the utter loss and annihilation of past time with all that it

held of action and suffering; the bitterness of the fear of death, and

the weariness of the clutch at life; such are among the thoughts of

most frequent recurrence. In one view these are the commonplaces of

literature; yet they are none the less the expression of the

profoundest thought of mankind.

In Greek literature from first to last the view of life taken by the

most serious thinkers was grave and sad. Not in one age or in one form

of poetry alone, but in most that are of great import, the feeling

that death was better than life is no mere caprice of melancholy, but

a settled conviction. The terrible words of Zeus in the Iliad to the

horses of Achilles,[11] "for there is nothing more pitiable than man,

of all things that breathe and move on earth," represent the Greek

criticism of life already mature and consummate. "Best of all is it

for men not to be born," says Theognis in lines whose calm perfection

has no trace of passion or resentment,[12] "and if born, to pass

inside Hades-gates as quickly as may be." Echoing these lines of the

Megarian poet, Sophocles at eighty, the most fortunate in his long and

brilliant life of all his contemporaries in an age the most splendid

that the world has ever witnessed, utters with the weight of a

testamentory declaration the words that thrill us even now by their

faultless cadence and majestic music;[13] "Not to be born excels on

the whole account; and for him who has seen the light to go whence he

came as soon as may be is next best by far." And in another line,[14]

whose rhythm is the sighing of all the world made audible, "For there

is no such pain," he says, "as length of life." So too the humane and

accomplished Menander, in the most striking of all the fragments

preserved from his world of comedies,[15] weighs and puts aside all

the attractions that life can offer: "Him I call most happy who,

having gazed without grief on these august things, the common sun, the

stars, water, clouds, fire, goes quickly back whence he came." With so

clear-sighted and so sombre a view of this life and with no certainty

of another, it was only the inspiration of great thought and action,

and the gladness of yet unexhausted youth, that sustained the ancient

world so long. And this gladness of youth faded away. Throughout all

the writing of the later classical period we feel one thing

constantly; that life was without joy. Alike in history and poetry,

alike in the Eastern and Western worlds, a settled gloom deepens into

night. The one desire left is for rest. Life is brief, as men of old

time said; but now there is scarcely a wish that it should be longer.

"Little is thy life and afflicted," says Leonidas,[16] "and not even

so is it sweet, but more bitter than loathed death." "Weeping I was

born, and when I have done my weeping I die," another poet wails,[17]

"and all my life is among many tears." Aesopus is in a strait betwixt

two; if one might but escape from life without the horror of dying!

for now it is only the revolt from death that keeps him in the anguish

of life.[18] To Palladas of Alexandria the world is but a slaughter-

house, and death is its blind and irresponsible lord.[19]

From the name of Palladas is inseparable the name of the famous

Hypatia, and the strange history of the Neo-Platonic school. The last

glimmer of light in the ancient world was from the embers of their

philosophy. A few late epigrams preserve a record of their mystical

doctrines, and speak in half-unintelligible language of "the one hope"

that went among them, a veiled and crowned phantom, under the name of

Wisdom. But, apart from those lingering relics of a faith among men

half dreamers and half charlatans, patience and silence were the only

two counsels left for the dying ancient world; patience, in which we

imitate God himself; silence, in which all our words must soon

end.[20] The Roman empire perished, it has been said, for want of men;

Greek literature perished for want of anything to say; or rather,

because it found nothing in the end worth saying. Its end was like

that recorded of the noblest of the Roman emperors;[21] the last word

uttered with its dying breath was the counsel of equanimity. Men had

once been comforted for their own life and death in the thought of

deathless memorials; now they had lost hope, and declared that no

words and no gods could give immortality.[22] Resignation[23] was the

one lesson left to ancient literature, and, this lesson once fully

learned, it naturally and silently died. All know how the ages that

followed were too preoccupied to think of writings its epitaph. For

century after century Goth and Hun, Lombard and Frank, Bulgarian and

Avar, Norman and Saracen, Catalan and Turk rolled on in a ceaseless

storm of slaughter and rapine without; for century after century

within raged no less fiercely the unending fury of the new theology.

Filtered down through Byzantine epitomes, through Arabic translations,

through every sort of strange and tortuous channel, a vague and

distorted tradition of this great literature just survived long enough

to kindle the imagination of the fifteenth century. The chance of

history, fortunate perhaps for the whole world, swept the last Greek

scholars away from Constantinople to the living soil of Italy,

carrying with them the priceless relics of forgotten splendours. To

some broken stones, and to the chance which saved a few hundred

manuscripts from destruction, is due such knowledge as we have to-day

of that Greek thought and life which still remains to us in many ways

an unapproached ideal.

----------

[1] Anth. Pal. v. 12; cf. the beautiful lyric with the refrain /Lytyll

ioye is son done/ (Percy Society, 1847).

[2] Anth. Pal. xi. 56.

[3] Cf. Ibid. xi. 25, 43; xii. 50.

[4] Theognis, 877, Bergk.

[5] Anth. Pal. ix. 412.

[6] Ibid. xi. 23.

[7] Archestr. ap. Athenaeum, vii. 286 a; {kan apothneskein melles,

arpason, . . kata usteron eoe o ti soi pepromenon estin}.

[8] Anth. Pal. xi. 3, 43, 56.

[9] Infra, xii. 19, 31, 24, 21.

[10] Citharist. Fr. 1, {ar esti suggenes to lupe kai bios}.

[11] Il. xvii. 443-447.

[12] Theognis, 425-8, Bergk.

[13] Oed. Col. 1225-8.

[14] Fr. Scyr. 500.

[15] Hypobolimaeus, Fr. 2.

[16] Anth. Pal. vii. 472.

[17] Ibid. x. 84.

[18] Ibid. x. 123.

[19] Ibid. x. 85.

[20] Ibid. x. 94, xi. 300.

[21] /Signum/ Aequanimitatis /dedit atque ita conversus quasi dormiret

spiritum reddidit./ Jul. Capitol., /Antoninus Pius/, c. xii.

[22] Anth. Pal. vii. 300, 362.

[23] {Esukhien agapan}, Ibid. x. 77.

XVI

That ancient world perished; and all the while, side by side with it,

a new world was growing up with which it had so little in common that

hitherto it would only have been confusing to take the latter much

into account. This review of the older civilisation has, so far as may

be, been kept apart from all that is implied by the introduction of

Christianity; it has even spoken of the decay and death of literature,

though literature and thought in another field were never more active

than in the early centuries of the Church. Of the immense gain that

came then to the world it is not necessary to speak; we all know it.

For the latter half of the period of human history over which the

Greek Anthology stretches, this new world was in truth the more

important of the two. While to the ageing Greek mind life had already

lost its joy, and thought begun to sicken, we hear the first notes of

a new glory and passion;

{Egeire o katheudon

Kai anasta ek ton vekron

Kai epiphausei soi o KHristos}[1]--

in this broken fragment of shapeless and barbaric verse, not in the

smooth and delicate couplets of contemporary poets, Polyaenus or

Antiphilus, lay the germ of the music which was to charm the centuries

that followed. Even through the long swoon of art which is usually

thought of as following the darkness of the third century, the truth

was that art was transforming itself into new shapes and learning a

new language. The last words of the Neo-Platonic philosophy with its

mystical wisdom were barely said when the Church of the Holy Wisdom

rose in Constantinople, the most perfect work of art that has yet been

known in organic beauty of design and splendour of ornament; and when

Justinian by his closure of the schools of Athens marked off, as by a

precise line, the end of the ancient world, in the Greek monasteries

of Athos new types of beauty were being slowly wrought out which

passed outward from land to land, transfiguring the face of the world

as they went, kindling new life wherever they fell, miraculously

transformed by the separate genius of every country from Norway to

India, creating in Italy the whole of the great medieval art that

stretches from Duccio and Giotto to Signorelli, and leaving to us

here, as our most precious inheritances, such mere blurred and broken

fragments of their glories as the cathedral churches of Salisbury and

Winchester.

It is only in the growth and life of that new world that the decay and

death of the old can be regarded with equanimity, or can in a certain

sense be historically justified: for Greek civilisation was and still

is so incomparable and so precious that its loss might otherwise fill

the mind with despair, and seem to be the last irony cast by fate

against the idea of human progress. But it is the law of all Nature,

from her highest works to her lowest, that life only comes by death;

"she replenishes one thing out of another," in the words of the Roman

poet, "and does not suffer anything to be begotten before she has been

recruited by the death of something else." To all things born she

comes one day with her imperious message: /materies opus est ut

crescant postera secla/.[2] With the infinite patience of one who has

inexhaustible time and imperishable material at her absolute command,

slowly, vacillatingly, not hesitating at any waste or any cruelty,

Nature works out some form till it approaches perfection; then finds

it flawed, finds it is not the thing she meant, and with the same

strong, unscrupulous and passionless action breaks it up and begins

anew. As in our own lives we sometimes feel that the slow progress of

years, the structure built up cell by cell through pain and patience

and weariness at lavish cost seems one day, when some great new force

enters our life, to begin to crumble and fall away from us, and leave

us strangers in a new world, so it is with the greater types of life,

with peoples and civilisations; some secret inherent flaw was in their

structure; they meet a trial for which they were not prepared, and

fail; once more they must be passed into the crucible and melted down

to their primitive matter. Yet Nature does not repeat herself; in some

way the experience of all past generations enters into those which

succeed them, and of a million of her works that have perished not one

has perished wholly without account. That Greece and Rome, though they

passed away, still influence us daily is indeed obvious; but it is as

certain that the great races before them, of which Babylonia,

Phoenicia, Egypt are only a few out of many, still live in the gradual

evolution of the purpose of history. They live in us indeed as blind

inherited forces, apart from our knowledge of them; yet if we can at

all realise any of them to ourselves, at all enter into their spirit,

our gain is great; for through time and distance they have become

simple and almost abstract; only what was most living in them

survives; and the loss of the vivid multiplicity and colour of a

fuller knowledge makes it easier to discriminate what was important in

them. Lapse of time has done for us with some portions of the past

what is so difficult or even impossible for us to do for ourselves

with the life actually round us, projected them upon an ideal plane:

how ideal, in the case of Greek history, is obvious if we consider for

a moment how nearly Homer and Herodotus are read alike by us. For

Homer's world was from the first imagined, not actual; yet the actual

world of the fifth century B.C. has become for us now no less an

ideal, perhaps one which is even more stimulating and more

fascinating. How far this may be due to any inherent excellence of its

own, how far to the subtle enchantment of association, does not affect

this argument. Of histories no less than of poems is it true that the

best are but shadows, and that, for the highest purposes which history

serves, the idea is the fact; the impression produced on us, the

heightening and ennobling influence of a life, ideal or actual, akin

to and yet different from ours, is the one thing which primarily

matters. And so it may be questioned whether so far as this, the vital

part of human culture, is concerned, modern scholarship has helped men

beyond the point already reached by the more imperfect knowledge and

more vivid intuitions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; for if

the effect produced on them, in the way of heightening and ennobling

life, was more than the effect now and here produced on us, we have,

so far as the Greek world is concerned, lost and not gained.

Compensations indeed there are; a vast experience has enlarged our

horizon and deepened our emotion, and it would be absurd to say now,

as was once truly and plausibly said, that Greek means culture. Yet

even now we could ill do without it; nor does there seem any reason

beyond the dulness of our imagination and the imperfection of our

teaching why it should not be as true and as living a help as ever in

our lives.

At the present day the risk is not of Greek art and literature being

too little studied, but of their being studied in too contracted and

formal a spirit. Less time is spent on the corruptions of medieval

texts, and on the imbecilities of the decadence; but all the more is

labour wasted and insight obscured by the new pedantry; the research

into unimportant origins which the Greeks themselves wisely left

covered in a mist of mythology. The destruction dealt on the Athenian

acropolis, under the name of scholarship, is a type of modern

practice. The history of two thousand years has so far as possible

been swept carelessly away in the futile attempt to lay bare an

isolated picture of the age of Pericles; now archaeologists find that

they cannot stop there, and fix their interest on the shapeless

fragments of barbaric art beneath. But the Greek spirit and temper is

perhaps less known than it once was; there appears to be a real danger

that the influence upon men, the surprise of joy once given them by

the work of Sophocles or Pheidias or Plato, dwindles with the

accumulation of importance given to the barbarous antecedents and

surroundings from which that great art sprang. The highest office of

history is to preserve ideals; and where the ideal is saved its

substructure may well be allowed to perish, as perish in the main it

must, in spite of all that we can recover from the slight and

ambiguous records which it leaves. The value of this selection of

minor poetry--if one can speak of a value in poetry beyond itself--is

that, however imperfectly, it draws for us in little a picture of the

Greek ideal with all its virtues and its failings: it may be taken as

an epitome, slightly sketched with a facile hand, of the book of Greek

life. How slight the material is in which this picture is drawn

becomes plain the moment we turn from these epigrams, however delicate

and graceful, to the great writers. Yet the very study of the lesser

and the appreciation that comes of study may quicken our understanding

of the greater; and there is something more moving and pathetic in

their survival, as of flowers from a strange land: white violets

gathered in the morning, to recur to Meleager's exquisite metaphor,

yielding still a faint and fugitive fragrance here in the never-ending

afternoon.

----------

[1] Quoted by S. Paul, Eph. v. 14.

[2] Lucr. i. 263, iii. 967.

ANTHOLOGY

TEXT AND TRANSLATIONS

CHAPTER I

LOVE

I

PRELUDE

POSIDIPPUS

Jar of Athens, drip the dewy juice of wine, drip, let the feast to

which all bring their share be wetted as with dew; be silenced the

swan, sage Zeno, and the Muse of Cleanthes, and let bitter-sweet Love

be our concern.

II

LAUS VENERIS

ASCLEPIADES

Sweet is snow in summer for the thirsty to drink, and sweet for

sailors after winter to see the garland of spring; but most sweet when

one cloak shelters two lovers, and the tale of love is told by both.

III

LOVE'S SWEETNESS

NOSSIS

Nothing is sweeter than love, and all delicious things are second to

it; yes, even honey I spit out of my mouth. Thus saith Nossis; but he

whom the Cyprian loves not, knows not what roses her flowers are.

IV

LOVE AND THE SCHOLAR

MARCUS ARGENTARIUS

Once when turning over the Book of Hesiod in my hands, suddenly I saw

Pyrrha coming in; and casting the book to the ground from my hand, I

cried out, Why bring your works to me, old Hesiod?

V

LOVERS' LIPS

PLATO

Kissing Agathon, I had my soul upon my lips; for it rose, poor wretch,

as though to cross over.

VI

THE FIRST KISS

STRATO

At evening, at the hour when we say good-night, Moeris kissed me, I

know not whether really or in a dream; for very clearly I now have the

rest in mind, all she said to me, and all that she asked me of; but

whether she kissed me too, I doubt and guess; for if it is true, how,

after being set in heaven, do I go to and fro upon earth?

VII

THE REVELLER

MELEAGER

Let the die be thrown; light up! I will on my way; see, courage!--

Heavy with wine, what is thy purpose?--I will revel.--I will revel?

whither wanderest, O heart?--And what is Reason to Love? light up,

quick!--And where is thy old study of philosophy?--Away with the long

toil of wisdom; this one thing only I know, that Love took captive

even the mind of Zeus.

VIII

LOVE AND WINE

RUFINUS

I am armed against Love with a breastplate of Reason, neither shall he

conquer me, one against one; yes, I a mortal will contend with him the

immortal: but if he have Bacchus to second him, what can I do alone

against the two?

IX

LOVE IN THE STORM

ASCLEPIADES

Snow, hail, darken, blaze, thunder, shake forth all thy glooming

clouds upon the earth; for if thou slay me, then will I cease, but

while thou lettest me live, though thou handle me worse than this, I

will revel. For the god draws me who is thy master too, at whose

persuasion, Zeus, thou didst once pierce in gold to that brazen

bridal-chamber.

X

A KISS WITHIN THE CUP

AGATHIAS

I am no wine-bibber; but if thou wilt make me drunk, taste thou first

and bring it me, and I take it. For if thou wilt touch it with thy

lips, no longer is it easy to keep sober or to escape the sweet cup-

bearer; for the cup ferries me over a kiss from thee, and tells me of

the grace that it had.

XI

LOVE'S MARTYR

MELEAGER

Evermore in my ears eddies the sound of Love, and my eye silently

carries sweet tears for the Desires; nor does night nor light let me

rest, but already my enchanted heart bears the well-known imprint. Ah

winged Loves, surely you know how to fly towards me, but have no whit

of strength to fly away.

XII

LOVE'S DRINK

MELEAGER

The cup is glad for sweetness, and says that it touches the sweet-

voiced mouth of love's darling, Zenophile. Happy! would that now,

bringing up her lips to my lips, she would drink at one draught the

very soul in me.

XIII

LOVE THE RUNAWAY

MELEAGER

I make hue and cry after wild Love; for now, even now in the morning

dusk, he flew away from his bed and was gone. This boy is full of

sweet tears, ever talking, swift, fearless, sly-laughing, winged on

the back, and carries a quiver. But whose son he is I may not say, for

Heaven denies having borne this ruffler, and so Earth and so Sea.

Everywhere and by all he is hated; but look you to it lest haply even

now he is laying more springes for souls. Yet--there he is, see! about

his lurking-place; I see thee well, my archer, ambushed in Zenophile's

eyes.

XIV

LOVE'S SYMPATHY

CALLIMACHUS

Our friend was wounded, and we knew it not; how bitter a sigh, mark

you? he drew all up his breast. Lo, he was drinking the third time,

and shedding their petals from the fellow's garlands the roses all

poured to the ground. He is well in the fire, surely; no, by the gods,

I guess not at random; a thief myself, I know a thief's footprints.

XV

THE MAD LOVER

PAULUS SILENTIARIUS

A man wounded by a rabid dog's venom sees, they say, the beast's image

in all water. Surely mad Love has fixed his bitter tooth in me, and

made my soul the prey of his frenzies; for both the sea and the eddies

of rivers and the wine-carrying cup show me thy image, beloved.

XVI

LOVE AT THE VINTAGE

AGATHIAS

We, as we trod the infinite fruit of Iacchus, mingled and wound in the

rhythm of the revel, and now the fathomless flood flowed down, and

like boats our cups of ivy-wood swam on the sweet surges; dipping

wherewith, we drank just as it lay at our hand, nor missed the warm

water-nymphs overmuch. But beautiful Rhodanthe leant over the

winepress, and with the splendours of her beauty lit up the welling

stream; and swiftly all our hearts were fluttered, nor was there one

of us but was overcome by Bacchus and the Paphian. Alas for us! he ran

plenteous at our feet, but for her, hope played with us, and no more.

XVII

LOVE'S GARLAND

MELEAGER

I will twine the white violet and I will twine the delicate narcissus

with myrtle buds, and I will twine laughing lilies, and I will twine

the sweet crocus, and I will twine therewithal the crimson hyacinth,

and I will twine lovers' roses, that on balsam-curled Heliodora's

temples my garland may shed its petals over the lovelocks of her hair.

XVIII

LOVER'S FRIGHT

MELEAGER

She is carried off! What savage could do so cruel a deed? Who so high

as to raise battle against very Love? Light torches, quick! and yet--a

footfall; Heliodora's; go back into my breast, O my heart.

XIX

LOVE IN SPRING

MELEAGER

Now the white violet blooms, and blooms the moist narcissus, and bloom

the mountain-wandering lilies; and now, dear to her lovers, spring

flower among the flowers, Zenophile, the sweet rose of Persuasion, has

burst into bloom. Meadows, why idly laugh in the brightness of your

tresses? for my girl is better than garlands sweet to smell.

XX

SUMMER NIGHT

MELEAGER

Shrill-crying gnats, shameless suckers of the blood of men, two-winged

monsters of the night, for a little, I beseech you, leave Zenophile to

sleep a quiet sleep, and see, make your feast of flesh from my limbs.

Yet to what end do I talk in vain? even relentless wild beasts take

delight in nestling on her delicate skin. But once more now I proclaim

it, O evil brood, cease your boldness or you shall know the force of

jealous hands.

XXI

PARTING AT DAWN

MELEAGER

Farewell, Morning Star, herald of dawn, and quickly come again as the

Evening Star, bringing secretly her whom thou takest away.

XXII

DEARER THAN DAY

PAULUS SILENTIARIUS

"Fare thou well," I would say to thee; and again I check my voice and

rein it backward, and again I stay beside thee; for I shrink from the

terrible separation from thee as from the bitter night of Acheron; for

the light of thee is like the day. Yet that, I think, is voiceless,

but thou bringest me also that murmuring talk of thine, sweeter than

the Sirens', whereon all my soul's hopes are hung.

XXIII

THE MORNING STAR

MACEDONIUS

Morning Star, do not Love violence, neither learn, neighbour as thou

art to Mars, to have a heart that pities not; but as once before,

seeing Phaethon in Clymene's chamber, thou heldest not on thy fleet-

foot course from the east, even so on the skirts of night, the night

that so hardly has lightened on my desire, come lingering as though

among the Cimmerians.

XXIV

AT COCKCROWING

ANTIPATER OF THESSALONICA

Grey dawn is over, Chrysilla, and ere now the morning cock clarisoning

leads on the envious Lady of Morn. Be thou accursed, most envious of

birds, who drivest me from my home to the endless chattering of the

young men. Thou growest old, Tithonus; else why dost thou chase Dawn

thy bedfellow out of her couch while yet morning is so young?

XXV

DAWN'S HASTE

MELEAGER

Grey dawn, why, O unloving, risest thou so swift round my bed, where

but now I nestled close to dear Demo? Would God thou wouldst turn thy

fleet course backward and be evening, thou shedder of the sweet light

that is so bitter to me. For once before, for Zeus and his Alcmena,

thou wentest contrary; thou art not unlessoned in running backward.

XXVI

DAWN'S DELAY

MELEAGER

Grey dawn, why, O unloving, rollest thou now so slow round the world,

since another is shrouded and warm by Demo? but when I held her

delicate form to my breast, swift thou wert upon us, shedding on me a

light that seemed to rejoice in my grief.

XXVII

WAITING

PAULUS SILENTIARIUS

Cleophantis lingers long; and the third lamp now begins to give a

broken glimmer as it silently wastes away. And would that the

firebrand in my heart too were quenched with the lamp, and did not

burn me long in wakeful desires. Ah how often she swore by the

Cytherean that she would be here at evenfall; but she recks not of

either men or gods.

XXVIII

WAITING IN VAIN

ASCLEPIADES

Nico the renowned consented to come to me at nightfall and swore by

the holy Lady of Laws; and she is not come, and the watch is gone by;

did she mean to forswear herself? Servants, put out the lamp.

XXIX

THE SCORNED LOVER

ASCLEPIADES

O Night, thee and none other I take to witness, how Nico's Pythias

flouts me, traitress as she is; asked, not unasked am I come; may she

yet blame thee in the selfsame plight standing by my doors!

XXX

SLEEPLESS NIGHT

AGATHIAS

All night long I sob; and when grey dawn rises and grants me a little

grace of rest, the swallows cry around and about me, and bring me back

to tears, thrusting sweet slumber away: and my unclosing eyes keep

vigil, and the thought of Rhodanthe returns again in my bosom. O

envious chatterers, be still; it was not I who shore away Philomela's

tongue; but weep for Itylus on the mountains, and sit wailing by the

hoopoe's court, that we may sleep a little; and perchance a dream will

come and clasp me round with Rhodanthe's arms.

XXXI

THE LOVE LETTER

RUFINUS

Rufinus to Elpis, my most sweet: well and very well be with her, if

she can be well away from me. No longer can I bear, no, by thine eyes,

my solitary and unmated severance from thee, but evermore blotted with

tears I go to Coressus or to the temple of the great Artemis; but

tomorrow my home shall receive me, and I will fly to thy face and bid

thee a thousand greetings.

XXXII

LOVE AND REASON

PHILODEMUS

My soul forewarns me to flee the desire of Heliodora, knowing well the

tears and jealousies of old. She talks; but I have no strength to

flee, for, shameless that she is, she forewarns, and while she

forewarns, she loves.

XXXIII

ODI ET AMO

MELEAGER

Take this message, Dorcas; lo again a second and a third time, Dorcas,

take her all my message; run; delay no longer; fly. Wait a little,

Dorcas, prithee a little; Dorcas, whither so fast before learning all

I would say? And add to what I have just said--but no, I go on like a

fool; say nothing at all--only that--say everything; spare not to say

everything. Yet why do I send thee out, Dorcas, when myself, see, I go

forth with thee?

XXXIV

LOOKING AND LIKING

PAULUS SILENTIARIUS

Eyes, how long are you draining the nectar of the Loves, rash drinkers

of the strong unmixed wine of beauty? let us run far away, as far as

we have strength to go, and in calm I will pour sober offerings to

Cypris the Placable. But if haply there likewise I be caught by the

sting, be you wet with chill tears and doomed for ever to bear

deserved pain; since from you, alas! it was that we fell into all this

labour of fire.

XXXV

FORGET-ME-NOT

AGATHIAS

Dost thou then also, Philinna, carry longing in thee, dost thou

thyself also sicken and waste away with tearless eyes? or is thy sleep

most sweet to thee, while of our care thou makest neither count nor

reckoning? Thou wilt find thy fate likewise, and thy haughty cheek I

shall see wetted with fast-falling tears. For the Cyprian in all else

is malign, but one virtue is in her lot, hatred of proud beauties.

XXXVI

AMANTIUM IRAE

PAULUS SILENTIARIUS

At evening Galatea slammed-to the doors in my face, flinging at me a

speech of scorn. "Scorn breaks love"; idly wanders this proverb; her

scorn inflames my love-madness the more. For I swore I would stay a

year away from her; out and alas! but with break of day I went to make

supplication.

XXXVII

INCONSTANCY

MACEDONIUS

Constantia, nay verily! I heard the name and thought it beautiful, but

thou art to me more bitter than death. And thou fliest him who loves

thee, and him who loves thee not thou pursuest, that he may love thee

and thou mayest fly him once again.

XXXVIII

TIME'S REVENGE

CALLIMACHUS

So mayest thou slumber, Conopion, as thou makest me sleep here in the

chill doorway; so mayest thou slumber, most cruel, as thou lullest thy

lover asleep; but not even in a dream hast thou known compassion. The

neighbours pity me, but thou not even in a dream; but the silver hair

will remind thee of all this by and by.

XXXIX

FLOWN LOVE

MARCUS ARGENTARIUS

Golden-horned Moon, thou seest this, and you fiery-shining Stars whom

Ocean takes into his breast, how perfume-breathing Ariste has gone and

left me alone, and this is the sixth day I cannot find the witch. But

we will seek her notwithstanding; surely I will send the silver

sleuth-hounds of the Cyprian on her track.

XL

MOONLIGHT

PHILODEMUS

Lady of Night, twy-horned, lover of nightlong revels, shine, O Moon,

shine, darting through the latticed windows; shed thy splendour on

golden Callistion; thine immortality may look down unchidden on the

deeds of lovers; thou dost bless both her and me, I know, O Moon; for

thy soul too was fired by Endymion.

XLI

LOVE AND THE STARS

PLATO

On the stars thou gazest, my Star; would I were heaven, that I might

look on thee with many eyes.

XLII

ROSE

AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Would I were a pink rose, that fastening me with thine hands thou

mightest grant me grace of thy snowy breast.

XLIII

LILY

THEOPHANES

Would I were a white lily, that fastening me with thine hands thou

mightest satisfy me with the nearness of thy body.

XLIV

LOVE AND SLEEP

MELEAGER

Thou sleepest, Zenophile, dainty girl; would that I had come to thee

now, a wingless sleep, upon thine eyelids, that not even he, even he

who charms the eyes of Zeus, might come nigh thee, but myself had held

thee, I thee alone.

XLV

SLAYER AND HEALER

MACEDONIUS

I have a wound of love, and from my wound flows ichor of tears, and

the gash is never staunched; for I am at my wits' end for misery, and

no Machaon sprinkles soothing drugs on me in my need. I am Telephus, O

maiden, but be thou my true Achilles; with thy beauty allay the

longing as thou didst kindle it.

XLVI

LOVE THE GAMBLER

MELEAGER

Still in his mother's lap, a child playing with dice in the morning,

Love played my life away.

XLVII

DRIFTING

MELEAGER

Bitter wave of Love, and restless gusty Jealousies and wintry sea of

revellings, whither am I borne? and the rudders of my spirit are quite

cast loose; shall we sight delicate Scylla once again?

XLVIII

LOVE'S RELAPSES

MELEAGER

Soul that weepest sore, how is Love's wound that was allayed in thee

inflaming through thy heart again! nay, nay, for God's sake, nay for

God's sake, O infatuate, stir not the fire that flickers low among the

ashes. For soon, O oblivious of thy pains, so sure as Love catches

thee in flight, again he will torture his found runaway.

XLIX

LOVE THE BALL-PLAYER

MELEAGER

Love who feeds on me is a ball-player, and throws to thee, Heliodora,

the heart that throbs in me. Come then, take thou Love-longing for his

playmate; but if thou cast me away from thee, I will not bear such

wanton false play.

L

LOVE'S ARROWS

MELEAGER

Nay by Demo's tresses, nay by Heliodora's sandal, nay by Timarion's

scent-dripping doorway, nay by great-eyed Anticleia's dainty smile,

nay by Dorothea's fresh-blossomed garlands, no longer, Love, does thy

quiver hide its bitter winged arrows, for thy shafts are all fixed in

me.

LI

LOVE'S EXCESS

AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Arm thyself, Cypris, with thy bow, and go at thy leisure to some other

mark; for I have not even room left for a wound.

LII

MOTH AND CANDLE

MELEAGER

If thou scorch so often the soul that flutters round thee, O Love, she

will flee away from thee; she too, O cruel, has wings.

LIII

LOVE AT AUCTION

MELEAGER

Let him be sold, even while he is yet asleep on his mother's bosom,

let him be sold; why should I have the rearing of this impudent thing?

For it is snub-nosed and winged, and scratches with its nail-tips, and

weeping laughs often between; and furthermore it is unabashed, ever-

talking, sharp-glancing, wild and not gentle even to its very own

mother, every way a monster; so it shall be sold; if any outward-bound

merchant will buy a boy, let him come hither. And yet he beseeches,

see, all in tears. I sell thee no more; be comforted; stay here and

live with Zenophile.

LIV

INTER MINORA SIDERA

MARCUS ARGENTARIUS

Pour ten cups for Lysidice, and for beloved Euphrante, slave, give me

one cup. Thou wilt say I love Lysidice more? No, by sweet Bacchus,

whom I drink deep in this bowl; Euphrante for me, one against ten; for

the one splendour of the moon also outshines the innumerable stars.

LV

ROSA TRIPLEX

MELEAGER

Pour for Heliodora as Persuasion, and as the Cyprian, and once more

for her again as the sweet-speeched Grace; for she is enrolled as my

one goddess, whose beloved name I will mix and drink in unmixed wine.

LVI

LOVE IN ABSENCE

MELEAGER

Pour, and again say, again, again, "Heliodora"; say it and mingle the

sweet name with the unmixed wine; and wreath me with that garland of

yesterday drenched with ointments, for remembrance of her. Lo, the

lovers' rose sheds tears to see her away, and not on my bosom.

LVII

LOVE'S PORTRAITURE

MELEAGER

Who of my friends has imaged me sweet-voiced Zenophile? who has

brought me one Grace of the three? Surely the man did a gracious deed

who gave this gift, and in his grace gave Grace herself to me.

LVIII

THE SEA'S WOOING

MELEAGER

Fond Asclepias with her sparkling eyes as of Calm woos all to make the

voyage of love.

LIX

THE LIGHT OF TROY

DIOSCORIDES

Athenion sang of that fatal horse to me; all Troy was in fire, and I

kindled along with it, not fearing the ten years' toil of Greece; and

in that single blaze Trojans and I perished together then.

LX

LOVE AND MUSIC

MELEAGER

Sweet is the tune, by Pan of Arcady, that thou playest on the harp,

Zenophile, oversweet are the notes of the tune. Whither shall I fly

from thee? on all hands the Loves encompass me, and let me not take

breath for ever so little space; for either thy form shoots longing

into me, or again thy music or thy graciousness, or--what shall I say?

all of thee; I kindle in the fire.

LXI

HONEY AND STING

MELEAGER

Flower-fed bee, why touchest thou my Heliodora's skin, leaving

outright the flower-bells of spring? Meanest thou that even the

unendurable sting of Love, ever bitter to the heart, has a sweetness

too? Yes, I think, this thou sayest; ah, fond one, go back again; we

knew thy news long ago.

LXII

LOVE'S MESSENGER

MELEAGER

Fly for me, O gnat, a swift messenger, and touch Zenophile, and

whisper lightly into her ears: "one awaits thee waking; and thou

sleepest, O oblivious of thy lovers." Up, fly, yes fly, O musical one;

but speak quietly, lest arousing her bedfellow too thou stir pangs of

jealousy against me; and if thou bring my girl, I will adorn thee with

a lion-skin, O gnat, and give thee a club to carry in thine hand.

LXIII

LOVE THE SLAYER

MELEAGER

I beseech thee, Love, charm asleep the wakeful longing in me for

Heliodora, pitying my suppliant verse; for, by thy bow that never has

learned to strike another, but always upon me pours its winged shafts,

even though thou slay me I will leave letters uttering this voice,

"Look, stranger, on Love's murdered man."

LXIV

FORSAKEN

MAECIUS

Why so woe-begone? and why, Philaenis, these reckless tearings of

hair, and suffusion of sorrowful eyes? hast thou seen thy lover with

another on his bosom? tell me; we know charms for grief. Thou weepest

and sayest no: vainly dost thou essay to deny; the eyes are more

trustworthy than the tongue.

LXV

THE SLEEPLESS LOVER

MELEAGER

Grasshopper, beguilement of my longings, luller asleep, grasshopper,

muse of the cornfield, shrill-winged, natural mimic of the lyre, harp

to me some tune of longing, striking thy vocal wings with thy dear

feet, that so thou mayest rescue me from the all-wakeful trouble of my

pains, grasshopper, as thou makest thy love-luring voice tremble on

the string; and I will give thee gifts at dawn, ever-fresh groundsel

and dewy drops sprayed from the mouths of the watering-can.

LXVI

REST AT NOON

MELEAGER

Voiceful cricket, drunken with drops of dew thou playest thy rustic

music that murmurs in the solitude, and perched on the leaf-edges

shrillest thy lyre-tune with serrated legs and swart skin. But my

dear, utter a new song for the tree-nymphs' delight, and make thy

harp-notes echo to Pan's, that escaping Love I may seek out sleep at

noon here lying under the shady plane.

LXVII

THE BURDEN OF YOUTH

ASCLEPIADES

I am not two and twenty yet, and I am weary of living; O Loves, why

misuse me so? why set me on fire; for when I am gone, what will you

do? Doubtless, O Loves, as before you will play with your dice,

unheeding.

LXVIII

BROKEN VOWS

MELEAGER

Holy night, and thou, O lamp, you and none other we took to witness of

our vows; and we swore, he that he would love me, and I that I would

never leave him, and you kept witness between us. And now he says that

these vows are written in running water, O lamp, and thou seest him on

the bosom of another.

LXIX

DOUBTFUL DAWN

MELEAGER

O night, O wakeful longing in me for Heliodora, and eyes that sting

with tears in the creeping grey of dawn, do some remnants of affection

yet remain mine, and is her memorial kiss warm upon my cold picture?

has she tears for bedfellows, and does she clasp to her bosom and kiss

a deluding dream of me? or has she some other new love, a new

plaything? Never, O lamp, look thou on that, but be guardian of her

whom I gave to thy keeping.

LXX

THE DEW OF TEARS

ASCLEPIADES

Stay there, my garlands, hanging by these doors, nor hastily

scattering your petals, you whom I have wetted with tears (for lovers'

eyes are rainy); but when you see him as the door opens, drip my rain

over his head, that so at least that golden hair may drink my tears.

LXXI

LOVE'S GRAVE

MELEAGER

When I am gone, Cleobulus--for what avails? cast among the fire of

young loves, I lie a brand in the ashes--I pray thee make the burial-

urn drunk with wine ere thou lay it under earth, and write thereon,

"Love's gift to Death."

LXXII

LOVE'S MASTERDOM

MELEAGER

Terrible is Love, terrible; and what avails it if again I say and

again, with many a moan, Terrible is Love? for surely the boy laughs

at this, and is pleased with manifold reproaches; and if I say bitter

things, they are meat and drink to him. And I wonder how thou, O

Cyprian, who didst arise through the green waves, out of water hast

borne a fire.

LXXIII

LOVE THE CONQUEROR

MELEAGER

I am down: tread with thy foot on my neck, cruel divinity; I know

thee, by the gods, heavy as thou art to bear: I know too thy fiery

arrows: but hurling thy brands at my soul thou wilt no longer kindle

it, for it is all ashes.

LXXIV

LOVE'S PRISONER

MELEAGER

Did I not cry aloud to thee, O soul, "Yes, by the Cyprian, thou wilt

be caught, poor lover, if thou flutterest so often near the lime-

twigs"? did I not cry aloud? and the snare has taken thee. Why dost

thou gasp vainly in the toils? Love himself has bound thy wings and

set thee on the fire, and sprinkled thee to swooning with perfumes,

and given thee in thy thirst hot tears to drink.

LXXV

FROST AND FIRE

MELEAGER

Ah suffering soul, now thou burnest in the fire, and now thou

revivest, and fetchest breath again: why weepest thou? when thou didst

feed pitiless Love in thy bosom, knewest thou not that he was being

fed for thy woe? knewest thou not? Know now his repayment, a fair

foster-hire! take it, fire and cold snow together. Thou wouldst have

it so; bear the pain; thou sufferest the wages of thy work, scorched

with his burning honey.

LXXVI

THE SCULPTOR OF SOULS

MELEAGER

Within my heart Love himself has moulded Heliodora with her lovely

voice, the soul of my soul.

LXXVII

LOVE'S IMMORTALITY

STRATO

Who may know if a loved one passes the prime, while ever with him and

never left alone? who may not satisfy to-day who satisfied yesterday?

and if he did satisfy, what should befall him not to satisfy

to-morrow?