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.
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.
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 livingEre thy fair light was fled;Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, givingNew 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}.
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.
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 katheudonKai anasta ek ton vekronKai 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.