“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ MELEAGER Island Tyre was my nurse; and the Attic land that lies in Syrian Gadara is the country of my birth; and I sprang of Eucrates, I Meleager, the companion of the Muses, first of all who have run side by side with the Graces of Menippus. And if I am a Syrian, what wonder? We all dwell in one country, O stranger, the world; one Chaos brought all mortals to birth. And when stricken in years, I inscribed this on my tablets before burial, since old age is death's near neighbour; but do thou, bidding hail to me, the aged talker, thyself reach a talking old age. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ VI THE WITHERED VINE LEONIDAS OF TARENTUM Even as a vine on her dry pole I support myself now on a staff, and death calls me to Hades. Be not obstinately deaf, O Gorgus; what is it the sweeter for thee if for three or four summers yet thou shalt warm thyself beneath the sun? So saying the aged man quietly put his life aside, and removed his house to the greater company.
VII ACCOMPLISHMENT THEAETETUS Crantor was delightful to men and yet more delightful to the Muses, and did not live far into age: O earth, didst thou enfold the sacred man in death, or does he still live in gladness there? ”

“ 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. ”

“ XXX THE VINE'S REVENGE EVENUS Though thou devour me down to the root, yet still will I bear so much fruit as will serve to pour libation on thee, O goat, when thou art sacrificed.
XXXI REVERSAL PLATO A man finding gold left a halter; but he who had left the gold, not finding it, knotted the halter he found.
XXXII TENANTS AT WILL AUTHOR UNKNOWN I was once the field of Achaemenides, now I am Menippus', and again I shall pass from another to another; for the former thought once that he owned me, and the latter thinks so now in his turn; and I belong to no man at all, but to Fortune. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ XXXVI LACRIMAE RERUM PALLADAS Weeping I was born and having wept I die, and I found all my living amid many tears. O tearful, weak, pitiable race of men, dragged under earth and mouldering away!
XXXVII THE WORLD'S WORTH AESOPUS How might one escape thee, O life, without dying? for thy sorrows are numberless, and neither escape nor endurance is easy. For sweet indeed are thy beautiful things of nature, earth, sea, stars, the orbs of moon and sun; but all else is fears and pains, and though one have a good thing befal him, there succeeds it an answering Nemesis. ”

“ X THE CASKET OF PANDORA MACEDONIUS I laugh as I look on the jar of Pandora, nor do I blame the woman, but the wings of the Blessings themselves; for they flutter through the sky over the abodes of all the earth, while they ought to have descended on the ground. But the woman behind the lid, with cheeks grown pallid, has lost the splendour of the beauties that she had, and now our life has missed both ways, because she grows old in it, and the jar is empty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ There is one descent for all to Hades; and if ours comes quicker, the sooner shall we look on Minos. Let us drink; for surely wine is a horse for the high-road, when foot-passengers take a by-path to Death.
X BEFORE THE DELUGE STRATO Drink now and love, Damocrates, since not for ever shall we drink nor for ever hold fast our delight; let us crown our heads with garlands and perfume ourselves, before others bring these offerings to our graves. Now rather let my bones drink wine inside me; when they are dead, let Deucalion's deluge sweep them away. ”

“ XLIII THE RULES OF THE GAME PALLADAS All life is a stage and a game: either learn to play it, laying by seriousness, or bear its pains.
XLIV THE ONE HOPE PAULUS SILENTIARIUS It is not living that has essential delight, but throwing away out of the breast cares that silver the temples. I would have wealth sufficient for me, and the excess of maddening care for gold ever eats away the spirit; thus among men thou wilt find often death better than life, as poverty than wealth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If one then chokes that little breath with his hand, he robs us of life, and brings us down to Hades. Thus being nothing we wax high in hardihood, feeding on air from a little breath.
XXVI TWO ETERNITIES LEONIDAS OF TARENTUM Infinite, O man, was the foretime until thou camest to thy dawn, and what remains is infinite on through Hades: what share is left for life but the bigness of a pinprick, and tinier than a pinprick if such there be? Little is thy life and afflicted; for not even so it is sweet, but more loathed than hateful death. ”

“ 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. ”