THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY--GREEK EPIGRAMS--HERODOTUS--ARISTOPHANES--PLATO.
The Greek anthology offers to our view, in the main, a body of
national sentiment and local costume. The witticisms or smart turns
are generally so much a part of the life of the country and period to
which they immediately appertain, that an English reader might be apt
scarcely to become aware of their true drift, of the inner satirical
or humorous sense in the mind and intention of their composers, if he
could forget that he had under his eyes the most important productions
of ancient Hellas in the way of Epigram and Epigrammatic Inscription
collected together for his edification and amusement.
It is perfectly natural and fit that the facetious literature of the
Greeks should partake in tone and odour of the genius, climate and
society which produced it. We may not appreciate a Greek joke, because
the train of associations is broken; but if it does not come home to
us exactly as it was meant by the author, it remains as a contributory
factor to our knowledge of a never-to-be-forgotten people.
All that I seek to urge here is, that the English school of wit has
barely any archaic foreign _substrata_, but is, to a very large and
leading extent, as my learned American acquaintance, Mr. Phelps, lately
observed of our law, a product of the region which gave it birth and
development. There are certain broad and general features common to all
humanity at all times, and independent of conditions and place:--
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,”
and there are cases, of course, where the same happy thought has
presented itself _bonâ fide_ to different persons at different
periods, to men chronologically and geographically as far removed as
an Athenian of the age of Pericles and an Englishman of the age of
George III. The same circumstances have a proneness to gravitate to
the same issues, where it is some normal trait of human nature that is
concerned, or some incident of habitual recurrence.
But the pages of this Greek Anthology, of which I employ for
convenience the ordinary English version, have to be winnowed in the
same proportion as those of the other classical or quasi-classical
books which we have just left behind us, in order to extract matter
which is perfectly intelligible without the context. For everybody must
feel that a translation has no chemical virtue beyond the exchange
of terms. A Greek epigram, in nine instances out of ten, is a Greek
epigram none the less though it be clothed in an English dress. It is
like a keyless cipher, unless the reader takes up the volume where
it occurs with a mastery of the surrounding conditions, which nine
Englishmen out of ten do not possess.
On the other hand, how free from temporary feeling and interest are
some of the flowers in this poetical chaplet! How superior to all the
mutations and vicissitudes which the land of their birth has since
suffered! Their motto is _Perennis et fragrans_.
Take a few illustrations:--
“Said the lame to the blind, ‘On your back let me rise’;
So the eyes were the legs, and the legs were the eyes.”
“A fool, bitten by many fleas, put out the light saying, ‘You no
longer see me.’”
“Why do you fruitlessly wash the body of an Indian? Forbear your art.”
“The thin Diophantus, once wishing to hang himself, laid hold of a
spider’s web, and strangled himself.”
“Pheidon neither drenched me nor touched me; but, being ill of a
fever, I remembered his name, and died.”
A more pungent jest on a doctor was never uttered, perhaps, than this!
Nor would it be easy to discover in our modern collections more telling
and ingenious skits than the two next:
“’Tis said that certain death awaits
The raven’s nightly cry;
But at the sound of Cymon’s voice
The very ravens die.”
“Lazy Mark, snug in prison, in prison to stay,
Thought confessing a murder the easiest way.”
Then how true to character and how permanent are such epigrammatic
_jeux d’esprit_ as these!
“ON A STATUE OF NIOBE.
“The gods to stone transformed me; but again
I from Praxiteles new life obtain.”
“Though to your face that mirror lies,
’Tis just the glass for you;
Demosthenes, you’d shut your eyes,
If it reflected true.”
“Some say, Nycilla, that you dye your hair--
Those jet black locks--you bought them at a fair;”
which is exactly the modern quatrain:
“The lovely hair, which Celia wears,
Is hers: who would have thought it?--
She swears ’tis hers, and true she swears;
For I know where she bought it.”
Plato is made to say of a statue: “Diodorus put to sleep this satyr,
not carved it”; and Lucian is accredited with the _mot_ that “it were
easier to find white crows and winged tortoises than an orator of
repute in Cappadocia.”
We come to an item, where Shakespear was unconsciously forestalled by
an epigrammatist who lived eleven centuries before him--Palladas the
grammarian:--
“This life a theatre we well may call,
Where every actor must perform with art:
Or laugh it through, and make a farce of all,
Or learn to bear with grace his tragic part.”
The old English proverb, “Building is a sweet impoverishing,” has its
prototype in the couplet:--
“The broad highway to poverty and need
Is much to build and many mouths to feed.”
But a second strikes the imagination as equally native and verdant,
from the supreme faculty which is resident in men of first-rate genius
of maintaining their proximity to each successive age:--
“The Muses to Herodotus one day
Came, nine of them, and dined;
And in return, their host to pay,
Each left a book behind.”
It cannot be predicated of what follows that the lapse of years has
impaired its application:--
“A boy was crowning the monument of his stepmother, thinking that her
temper had been changed. But the stone, falling, killed the child,
while he leaned on the grave. Shun, ye children, even the grave of a
stepmother.”
There is an epigram on a miser, who calculated, while he was ill in
bed, that it would cost a drachma more to live than to die, and refused
to see a physician; and a second on a bad poet and a clumsy surgeon, of
whom it is said that they had destroyed more persons than “the waters
in the time of Deucalion, or than Phaeton, who burned up those upon the
earth.”
The _Anthology_ is of a mingled yarn, like our own Miscellanies, in
which the most delicate wit and the broadest fun so frequently find
themselves next neighbours. The pair which I subjoin belongs to the
former and higher category:--
“The Muses, seeking for a shrine,
Whose glories ne’er should cease,
Found, as they stray’d, the soul divine
Of Aristophanes.”
“Three are the Graces. Thou wert born to be
The Grace that serves to grace the other three.”
The first of these is ascribed to Plato, who was better prepared
to relish, than we can be reasonably asked to do, the faithful and
diverting reflections of contemporary life and Greek human nature
from the pens of the dramatists of his country. The value of such
masterpieces as literary compositions and pictures of manners remains
unaltered and unalterable; but upon us the comic strokes and the byplay
are almost lost. Nor would it be possible to fill a small volume with
_bons-mots_ from the Greek Theatre, likely to appeal with success
to the existing market. For the elements of popularity are clearly
and naturally hostile to its endurance; and the narrow extent of the
exceptions proves the rule. The bulk of our own popular literature of
all kinds is _feuille-morte_; and no artificial reproduction can make
it otherwise than archæologically instructive. To reprint a book which
is dead is to make it die twice.
Out of these _Lives of Philosophers_, this _Table-Talk_ of Athenæus,
these _Attic Nights_, and this _Florilegium_ of satire and wit, the
_Anthology_, what sort of sum-total does the harvestman gather in? But
unless by a strange accident the best specimens of the Greek Muse in
the present direction or department have unexceptionally disappeared,
these must have constituted the staple material with which the Athenian
Club of the _Sixty_ amused themselves and their correspondents.
The story about Philip and his connection with this body perhaps sets
the father of Alexander before some of us in a rather new light, and in
a more favourable one than other anecdotes which are associated with
his name. By the way, that where the poor woman is made to appeal from
Philip drunk to Philip sober, strikes us as having more than a jocular
value--as betokening the primitive condition of judicial forms in
Macedon at that period.
It forms by no means the least singular of survivals that the names
of several of the members of the Sixty Club have been preserved--just
a tenth, including that of one who was nicknamed the _Lobster_. The
Sixty were to Athenian society what the Literary Club was to London in
the days of Reynolds and Johnson--possibly more; for it was a greater
novelty and a fresher influence. But the Literary Club itself was far
more than the successor of other institutions, of which earlier men,
like Beaumont and Dryden, Addison and Steele, had been the ornament and
the life.
The modern manner of epigrammatic wit may be intrinsically similar to
that of the Greeks, but certainly diverges from it widely enough in
point of detail and colour. I am only at present, however, dealing with
the _principia_ of the subject, and shewing, as well as I can, to what
extent the ancients laid the foundations of the wealth in this branch
of culture of which we find ourselves the possessors.
But the strong influence of local atmosphere and idiom is illustrated
by that epigram of Burns to Mr. Ferguson:--
“The king’s poor blackguard slave am I,
And scarce dare spare a minute;
But I’ll be wi’ you by-and-by,
Or else the devil’s in it;”
which strikes both sides of the Tweed as intelligible and clever,
but would have fallen as flatly on the ear of a Greek as some of the
traditional sayings in Athenæus, at which the Sixty would have clapped
their hands, do on that of a modern Englishman.
The epigram lends itself with tolerable readiness to the service of the
joking guild, and the rhythmical form often communicates an elegance
of turn and a happiness of finish not reachable in prose. The distich
of Dr. Joseph Warton on the aphorism of his friend Dr. Balguy, _that
wisdom was sorrow_, is to the point here:--
“If what you advance, dear Doctor, be true,
That wisdom is sorrow, how wretched are you!”
where in a couplet we see combined jest, sentiment, and philosophy: a
sparkling antithesis and a compliment worthy of Pope.
Sometimes the epigrammatic jest of later days confines itself to mere
verbal quibble; as, for instance:--
“The French have taste in all they do,
Which we are quite without;
For nature, which to them gave _goût_,
To us gave only gout.”
A small thesis on international pronunciation, for which its metric
dress partly helps as a passport: how lamely it would read in prose!
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