Chapter VII: Section IV: , together with what was not already classed, fell (2)

Two epigrams above all deserve special notice; one almost universally known, that written by Callimachus on his dead friend, the poet Heraclitus of Halicarnassus; the other, no less noble, though it has not the piercing tenderness of the first, by Claudius Ptolemaeus, the great astronomer, upon his own science, a science then not yet divorced from art and letters. The picture touched by Callimachus of that ancient and brilliant life, where two friends, each an accomplished scholar, each a poet, saw the summer sun set in their eager talk, and listened through the dusk to the singing nightingales, is a more exquisite tribute than all other ancient writings have given to the imperishable delight of literature, the mingled charm of youth and friendship, and the first stirring of the blood by poetry, and the first lifting of the soul by philosophy.[19] And on yet a further height, above the nightingales, under the solitary stars alone, Ptolemy as he traces the celestial orbits is lifted above the touch of earth, and recognises in man's mortal and ephemeral substance a kinship with the eternal. /Man did eat angels' food: he opened the doors of heaven./[20] ----------

[1] Anth. Pal. vii. 39, 34, 21, 22.

[2] Ibid. ix. 97, 358, 205.

[3] Cf. iv. 1 in this selection.

[4] Anth. Pal. vii. 696, App. Plan. 8, 225, 226, 244.

[5] Anth. Pal. ix. 433. On this epigram Jacobs says, /Frigide hoc
carmen interpretantur qui illud tabulae pictae adscriptum fuisse
existimant/. But the art of poems on pictures, which flourished to
an immense degree in the Alexandrian and later periods, had not
then been revived. One can fancy the same note being made hundreds
of years hence on some of Rossetti's sonnets.

[6] Anth. Pal. xi. 215, 133, 143, 354, 136.

[7] Ibid. vi. 303, ix. 174, vi. 310; cf. also x. 35 in this selection.

[8] Ibid. xi. 400.

[9] Compare Anth. Pal. xii. 43 with ix. 565.

[10] Ibid. xi. 140, 142, 275.

[11] Anth. Pal. ii., iii.

[12] App. Plan. 200, 207, 208, 209, 214, 215, 250.

[13] Anth. Pal. xi. 141, 142, 144, 157; vii. 571.

[14] iv. 46 in this selection.

[15] Poet. 1448 b. 15-20.

[16] Republic, x. 597.

[17] App. Plan. 248.

[18] App. Plan. 146, 244.

[19] Anth. Pal. vii. 80. Cf. In Memoriam, xxiii.

[20] Anth. Pal. ix. 577; notice especially {theies pimplamai
ambrosies}.

XI

That the feeling for Nature is one of the new developments of the modern spirit, is one of those commonplaces of criticism which express vaguely and loosely a general impression gathered from the comparison of ancient with modern poetry. Like most of such generalisations it is not of much value unless defined more closely; and as the definition of the rule becomes more accurate, the exceptions and limitations to be made grow correspondingly numerous. The section which is here placed under this heading is obviously different from any collection which could be made of modern poems, professing to deal with Nature and not imitated from the Greek. But when we try to analyse the difference, we find that the word Nature is one of the most ambiguous possible. Man's relation to Nature is variable not only from age to age, and from race to race, but from individual to individual, and from moment to moment. And the feeling for Nature, as expressed in literature, varies not only with all these variations but with other factors as well, notably with the prevalent mode of poetical expression, and with the condition of the other arts. The outer world lies before us all alike, with its visible facts, its demonstrable laws, /Natura daedala rerum/; but with each of us the /species ratioque naturae/, the picture presented by the outer world and the meaning that underlies it, are created in our own minds, the one by the apprehensions of our senses (and the eye sees what it brings the power to see), the other by our emotions, our imagination, our intellectual and moral qualities, as all these are affected by the pageant of things, and affect it in turn. And in no case can we express in words the total impression made upon us, but only that amount of it for which we possess a language of sufficient range and power and flexibility. For an impression has permanence and value-- indeed one may go further and say has reality--only in so far as it is fixed and recorded in language, whether in the language of words or that of colours, forms, and sounds.

First in the natural order comes that simply sensuous view of the outer world, where combination and selection have as yet little or no part. Objects are distinct from one another, each creates a single impression, and the effect of each is summed up in a single phrase. The "constant epithet" of early poetry is a survival of this stage of thought; nature is a series of things, every one of which has its special note; "green grass," "wet water." Here the feeling for Nature likewise is simple and sensuous; the pleasure of shade and cool water in summer, of soft grass to lie on, of the flowers and warm sunshine of spring.

Then out of this infancy of feeling rises the curiosity of childhood; no longer content with noting and recording the obvious aspects of Nature, man observes and inquires and pays attention. The more attention is paid, the more is seen: and an immense growth follows in the language of poetry. To express the feeling for nature description becomes necessary, and this again involves, in order that the work may not be endless, selection and composition.

Again, upon this comes the sentimental feeling for Nature, a sort of sympathy created by interest and imagination. Among early races this, like other feelings, expresses itself in the forms of mythology, and half personifies the outer world, giving the tree her Dryad and the fountain her Nymph, making Pan and Echo meet in the forest glade. When the mythological instinct has ceased to be active, it results in sentimental description, sometimes realistic in detail, sometimes largely or even wholly conventional. It has always in it something of a reaction, real or affected, from crowds and the life of cities, an attempt to regain simplicity by isolation from the complex fabric of society.

Once more, the feeling for Nature may go deeper than the senses and the imagination, and become moral. The outer world is then no more a spectacle only, but the symbol of a meaning, the embodiment of a soul. Earth, the mother and fostress, receives our sympathy and gives us her own. The human spirit turns away from itself to seek sustenance from the mountains and the stars. The whole outer universe becomes the visible and sensible language of an ideal essence; and dawn or sunset, winter or summer, is of the nature of a sacrament.

There is over and above all these another sense in which we may speak of the feeling for Nature; and in regard to poetry it is perhaps the most important of all. But it no longer follows, like the rest, a sort of law of development in human nature generally; it is confined to art, and among the arts is eminent in poetry beyond the rest. This is the romantic or magical note. It cannot be analysed, perhaps it cannot be defined; the insufficiency of all attempted definitions of poetry is in great part due to the impossibility of their including this final quality, which, like some volatile essence, escapes the moment the phial is touched. In the poetry of all ages, even in the periods where it has been most intellectual and least imaginative, come sudden lines like the /Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles/ of Corneille, like the /Placed far amid the melancholy main/ of Thomson, where the feeling for Nature cannot be called moral, and yet stirs us like the deepest moral criticism upon life, rising as far beyond the mere idealism of sentiment as it does beyond the utmost refinement of realistic art.

In all these different forms the feeling for Nature may be illustrated from Greek poetry; but the broad fact remains that Nature on the whole has a smaller part than it has with modern poets. Descriptive pieces are executed in a slighter manner, and on the whole with a more conventional treatment. Landscapes, for example, are always a background, never (or hardly ever) the picture itself. The influence of mythology on art was so overwhelming that, down to the last, it determined the treatment of many subjects where we should now go directly to the things themselves. Especially is this so with what has been described as the moral feeling for nature. Among "the unenlightened swains of Pagan Greece," as Wordsworth says, the deep effect of natural beauty on the mind was expressed under the forms of a concrete symbolism, a language to which literature had grown so accustomed that they had neither the power nor the wish to break free from it. The appeal indeed from man to Nature, and especially the appeal to Nature as knowing more about man's destiny than he knows himself, was unknown to the Greek poets. But this feeling is sentimental, not moral; and with them too "something far more deeply interfused" stirred the deepest sources of emotion. The music of Pan, at which the rustle of the oakwood ceases and the waterfall from the cliff is silent and the faint bleating of the sheep dies away,[1] is the expression in an ancient language of the spirit of Nature, fixed and embodied by the enchanting touch of art.

Of the epigrams which deal primarily with the sensuous feeling for Nature, the most common are those on the delight of summer, rustling breezes and cold springs and rest under the shadow of trees. In the ardours of midday the traveller is guided from the road over a grassy brow to an ice-cold spring that gushes out of the rock under a pine; or lying idly on the soft meadow in the cool shade of the plane, is lulled by the whispering west wind through the branches, the monotone of the cicalas, the faint sound of a far-off shepherd's pipe floating down the hills; or looking up into the heart of the oak, sees the dim green roof, layer upon layer, mount and spread and shut out the sky.[2] Or the citizen, leaving the glare of town, spends a country holiday on strewn willow-boughs with wine and music,[3] as in that most perfect example of the poetry of a summer day, the /Thalysia/ of Theocritus. Down to a late Byzantine period this form of poetry, the nearest approach to pure description of nature in the old world, remained alive; as in the picture drawn by Arabius of the view from a villa on the shore of the Propontis, with its gardens set between wood and sea, where the warbling of birds mingled with the distant songs of the ferrymen.[4] Other landscape poems, as they may be called, remarkable for their clear and vivid portraiture, are that of Mnasalcas,[5] the low shore with its bright surf, and the temple with its poplars round which the sea-fowl hover and cry, and that of Anyte,[6] the windy orchard-close near the grey colourless coast, with the well and the Hermes standing over it at the crossways. But such epigrams always stop short of the description of natural objects for their own sake, for the mere delight in observing and speaking about them. Perhaps the nearest approach that Greek poetry makes to this is in a remarkable fragment of Sophocles,[7] describing the shiver that runs through the leaves of a poplar when all the other trees stand silent and motionless.

The descriptions of Nature too are, as a rule, not only slightly sketched, but kept subordinate to a human relation. The brilliance and loveliness of spring is the background for the picture of the sailor again putting to sea, or the husbandman setting his plough at work in the furrow; the summer woods are a resting-place for the hot and thirsty traveller; the golden leaves of autumn thinning in the frosty night, making haste to be gone before the storms of rough November, are a frame for the boy beneath them.[8] The life of earth is rarely thought of as distinct from the life of man. It is so in a few late epigrams. The complaint of the cicala, torn away by shepherds from its harmless green life of song and dew among the leaves, and the poem bidding the blackbird leave the dangerous oak, where, with its breast against a spray, it pours out its clear music,[9] are probably of Roman date; another of uncertain period but of great beauty, an epitaph on an old bee-keeper who lived alone on the hills with the high woods and pastures for his only neighbours, contrasts with a strangely modern feeling the perpetuity of nature and the return of the works of spring with the brief life of man that ends once for all on a cold winter night.[10]

Between the simply sensuous and the deep moral feeling for nature lies the broad field of pastoral. This is not the place to enter into the discussion of pastoral poetry; but it must be noted in passing that it does not imply of necessity any deep love, and still less any close observation, of nature. It looks on nature, as it looks on human life, through a medium of art and sentiment; and its treatment of nature depends less on the actual world around it than on the prevalent art of the time. Greek art concentrated its efforts on the representation of the human figure, and even there preferred the abstract form and the rigid limitations of sculpture; and the poetry that saw, as it were, through the eyes of art sought above all things simplicity of composition and clearness of outline. The scanty vocabulary of colour in Greek poetry, so often noticed, is a special and patent example of this difference in the spirit with which Nature was regarded. As the poetry of Chaucer corresponds, in its wealth and intimacy of decoration, to the illuminations and tapestries of the middle ages, so the epigrams given under this section constantly recall the sculptured reliefs and the engraved gems of Greek art.

But any such general rules must be taken with their exceptions. As there is a risk of reading modern sentiment into ancient work, and even of fixing on the startling modernisms that occur in Greek poetry,[11] and dwelling on them till they assume an exaggerated importance, so there is a risk perhaps as great of slurring over the inmost quality, the poetry of the poetry, where it has that touch of romance or magic that sets it beyond all our generalisations. The magical charm is just what cannot be brought under any rules; it is the result less of art than of instinct, and is almost independent of time and place. The lament of the swallow in an Alexandrian poet[12] touches the same note of beauty and longing that Keats drew from the song of the nightingale; the couplet of Satyrus, where echo repeats the lonely cry of the birds,[13] is, however different in tone, as purely romantic as the opening lines of /Christabel/. ----------

[1] Anth. Pal. ix. 823.

[2] App. Plan. 230, 227; Anth. Pal. ix. 71.

[3] vi. 28 in this selection.

[4] Anth. Pal. ix. 667.

[5] Ibid. ix. 333.

[6] Ibid. ix. 314.

[7] Aegeus, fr. 24; cf. the celebrated simile in /Hyperion/,
beginning, /As when upon a tranced summer night/.

[8] Anth. Pal. xii. 138.

[9] Ibid. ix. 373, 87.

[10] Ibid. vii. 717.

[11] A curious instance is in an epigram by Mnasalcas (Anth. Pal. vii.
194), where he speaks of the evening hymn ({panesperon umnon}) of
the grasshopper. This, it must be remembered, was written in the
third century B.C.

[12] Pamphilus in Anth. Pal. ix. 57.

[13] App. Plan. 153.

XII

Though fate and death make a dark background against which the brilliant colouring of Greek life glitters out with heightened magnificence, the comedy of men and manners occupies an important part of their literature, and Aristophanes and Menander are as intimately Greek as Sophocles. It is needless to speak of what we gain in our knowledge of Greece from the preserved comedies of Aristophanes; and if we follow the best ancient criticism, we must conclude that in Menander we have lost a treasury of Greek life that cannot be replaced. Quintilian, speaking at a distance from any national or contemporary prejudice, uses terms of him such as we should not think unworthy of Shakespeare.[1] These Attic comedians were the field out of which epigrammatists, from that time down to the final decay of literature, drew some of their graver and very many of their lighter epigrams. Of the convivial epigrams in the Anthology a number are imitated from extant fragments of the New Comedy; one at least[2] transfers a line of Menander's unaltered; and short fragments of both Menander and Diphilus are included in the Anthology as though not materially differing from epigrams themselves.[3]

Part of this section might be classed with the criticism of life from the Epicurean point of view. Some of the convivial epigrams are purely unreflective; they speak only of the pleasure of the moment, the frank joy in songs and wine and roses, at a vintage-revel, or in the chartered licence of a public festival, or simply without any excuse but the fire in the blood, and without any conclusion but the emptied jar.[4] Some bring in a flash of more vivid colour where Eros mingles with Bromius, and, on a bright spring day, Rose-flower crosses the path, carrying her fresh-blown roses.[5] Others, through their light surface, show a deeper feeling, a claim half jestingly but half seriously made for dances and lyres and garlands as things deeply ordained in the system of nature, a call on the disconsolate lover to be up and drink, and rear his drooping head, and not lie down in the dust while he is yet alive.[6] Some in complete seriousness put the argument for happiness with the full force of logic and sarcasm. "All the ways of life are pleasant," cries Julianus in reply to the weariness expressed by an earlier poet;[7] "in country or town, alone or among fellow-men, dowered with the graciousness of wife and children, or living on in the free and careless life of youth; all is well, live!" And the answer to melancholy has never been put in a concrete form with finer and more penetrating wit than in the couplet of Lucian on the man who must needs be sober when all were drinking, and so appeared in respect of his company to be the one drunk man there.[8]

It is here that the epigrams of comedy reach their high-water mark; in contrast to them is another class in which the lightness is a little forced and the humour touches cynicism. In these the natural brutality of the Roman mind makes the Latin epigram heavier and keener-pointed; the greater number indeed of the Greek epigrams of this complexion are of the Roman period; and many of them appear to be directly imitated from Martial and Juvenal, though possibly in some cases it is the Latin poet who is the copyist.

Though they are not actually kept separate--nor indeed would a complete separation be possible--the heading of this section of the Palatine Anthology distinguishes the {sumpotika}, the epigrams of youth and pleasure, from the {skoptika}, the witty or humorous verses which have accidentally in modern English come almost to absorb the full signification of the word epigram. The latter come principally under two heads: one, where the point of the epigram depends on an unexpected verbal turn, the other, where the humour lies in some gross exaggeration of statement. Or these may be combined; in some of the best there is an accumulation of wit, a second and a third point coming suddenly on the top of the first.[9]

Perhaps the saying, so often repeated, that ancient humour was simpler than modern, rests on a more sufficient basis than most similar generalisations; and indeed there is no single criterion of the difference between one age and another more easy and certain of application, where the materials for applying it exist, than to compare the things that seem amusing to them. A certain foundation of humour seems to be the common inheritance of mankind, but on it different periods build differently. The structure of a Greek joke is generally very simple; more obvious and less highly elliptical in thought than the modern type, but, on the other hand, considerably more subtle than the wit of the middle ages. There was a store of traditional jests on the learned professions, law, astrology, medicine --the last especially; and the schools of rhetoric and philosophy were, from their first beginning, the subject of much pleasantry. Any popular reputation, in painting, music, literature, gave material for facetious attack; and so did any bodily defect, even those, it must be added, which we think of now as exciting pity or as to be passed over in silence.[10] Many of these jokes, which even then may have been of immemorial antiquity, are still current. The serpent that bit a Cappadocian and died of it, the fashionable lady whose hair is all her own, and paid for,[11] are instances of this simple form of humour that has no beginning nor end. Some Greek jests have an Irish inconsequence, some the grave and logical monstrosity of American humour.

Naïve, crude, often vulgar; such is the general impression produced by the mass of these lighter epigrams. The bulk of them are of late date; and the culture of the ancient world was running low when its /vers de société/ reached no higher level than this. Of course they can only be called poetry by a large stretch of courtesy. In a few instances the work is raised to the level of art by a curious Dutch fidelity and minute detail. In one given in this selection,[12] a great poet has bent to this light and trivial style. The high note of Simonides is as clear and certain here as in his lines on the Spartans at Thermopylae or in the cry of grief over the young man dead in the snow-clogged surf of the Saronic sea. With such exceptions, the only touch of poetry is where a graver note underlies their light insolence. "Drink with me," runs the Greek song, "be young with me; love with me, wear garlands with me; be mad with me in my madness; I will be serious with you in your seriousness."[13] And so behind the flutes and flowers change comes and the shadow of fate stands waiting, and through the tinkling of the rose-hung river is heard in undertone the grave murmur of the sea. ----------

[1] /Omnem vitae imaginem expressit . . . omnibus rebus, personis,
adfectibus accomodatus/: see the whole passage, Inst. Rhet. x. i.
69-72.

[2] Anth. Pal. xi. 286.

[3] Ibid. xi. 438, 439.

[4] Ibid. v. 134, 135; xi. 1.

[5] Ibid. v. 81; xi. 64.

[6] Anth. Pal. ix. 270; xii. 50.

[7] Ibid. ix. 446.

[8] Ibid. xi. 429.

[9] Cf. ibid. xi. 85, 143.

[10] Cf. Anth. Pal. xi. 342, 404.

[11] Ibid. xi. 68, 237.

[12] Infra, x. 5.

[13] Athenaeus, 695, d.

XIII

For over all Greek life there lay a shadow. Man, a weak and pitiable creature, lay exposed to the shafts of a grim and ironic power that went its own way careless of him, or only interfered to avenge its own slighted majesty. "God is always jealous and troublesome"; such is the reflection which Herodotus, the pious historian of a pious age, puts in the mouth of the wisest of the Greeks.[1] Punishment will sooner or later follow sin; that is certain; but it is by no means so certain that the innocent will not be involved with the guilty, or that offence will not be taken where none was meant. The law of /laesa majestas/ was executed by the ruling powers of the universe with unrelenting and undiscriminating severity. Fate seemed to take a sardonic pleasure in confounding expectation, making destruction spring out of apparent safety, and filling life with dramatic and memorable reversals of fortune.

And besides the bolts launched by fate, life was as surely if more slowly weighed down by the silent and ceaseless tide of change against which nothing stood fixed or permanent, and which swept the finest and most beautiful things away the soonest. The garland that blooms at night withers by morning; and the strength of man and the beauty of women are no longer-lived than the frail anemone, the lily and violet that flower and fall.[2] Sweetness is changed to bitterness; where the rose has spread her cup, one goes by and the brief beauty passes; returning, the seeker finds no rose, but a thorn. Swifter than the flight of a bird through the air the light-footed Hours pass by, leaving nothing but scattered petals and the remembrance of youth and spring.[3] The exhortation to use the brief space of life, to realise, and, so far as that may be, to perpetuate in action the whole of the overwhelming possibilities crowded into a minute's space[4] comes with a passion like that of Shakespeare's sonnets. "On this short day of frost and sun to sleep before evening" is the one intolerable misuse of life.[5] Sometimes the feeling is expressed with the vivid passion of a lyric:--"To what profit? for thou wilt not find a lover among the dead, O girl";[6] sometimes with the curiously impersonal and incomparably direct touch that is peculiar to Greek, as in the verses by Antipater of Sidon,[7] that by some delicate magic crowd into a few words the fugitive splendour of the waning year, the warm lingering days and sharp nights of autumn, and the brooding pause before the rigours of winter, and make the whole masque of the seasons a pageant and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of loveliness; and the bitter laugh over the empty casket of Pandora[8] comes from a heart wrung with the sorrow that beauty is less strong than time. Nor is the burden of these poems only that pleasant things decay; rather that in nothing good or bad, rich or mean, is there permanence or certitude, but everywhere and without selection Time feeds oblivion with decay of things. All things flow and nothing abides; shape and name, nature and fortune yield to the dissolving touch of time.[9]

Even then the world was old. The lamentations over decayed towns and perished empires remind us that the distance which separates the age of the Caesars from our own is in relation to human history merely a chapter somewhere in the middle of a great volume. Then, no less than now, men trod daily over the ruins of old civilisations and the monuments of lost races. One of the most striking groups of poems in the Anthology is the long roll of the burdens of dead cities; Troy, Delos, Mycenae, Argos, Amphipolis, Corinth, Sparta.[10] The depopulation of Greece brought with it a foreshadowing of the wreck of the whole ancient world. With the very framework of human life giving way daily before their eyes, men grew apt to give up the game. The very instability of all things, once established as a law, brought a sort of rest and permanence with it; "there is nothing strictly immutable," they might have said, "but mutability." Thus the law of change became a permanent thread in mortal affairs, and, with the knowledge that all the old round would be gone over again by others, grew the sense that in the acceptance of this law of nature there was involved a conquest of nature, an overcoming of the world.

For the strength of Fate was not otherwise to be contended with, and its grim irony went deeper than human reach. Nemesis was merciless; an error was punished like a crime, and the more confident you had been that you were right, the most severe was the probable penalty. But it was part of Fate's malignity that, though the offender was punished, though Justice took care that her own interests were not neglected nor her own majesty slighted, even where a humane judge would have shrunk from inflicting a disproportionate penalty,[11] yet for the wronged one himself she provided no remedy; he suffered at his own risk. For falseness in friendship, for scorn of poverty, for wanton cruelty and torture, the wheel of fortune brought round some form of retribution, but the sufferers were like pieces swept off the board, once and for all.

And Fate seemed to take a positive pleasure in eluding anticipation and constructing dramatic surprises. Through all Greek literature this feeling shows itself; and later epigrams are full of incidents of this sort, recounted and moralised over with the wearisomeness of a tract, stories sometimes obviously invented with an eye to the moral, sometimes merely silly, sometimes, though rarely, becoming imaginative. The contrast of a youth without means to indulge its appetites and an age without appetites to exhaust its means; the story of the poor man who found treasure and the rich man who hanged himself; the fable of the vine's revenge upon the goat, are typical instances of the prosaic epigram.[12] The noble lines inscribed upon the statue of Memnon at Thebes[13] are an example of the vivid imaginative touch lighting up a sufficiently obvious theme for the rhetorician. Under the walls of Troy, long ages past, the son of Dawn had fallen under Achilles' terrible spear; yet now morning by morning the goddess salutes her son and he makes answer, while Thetis is childless in her sea-halls, and the dust of Achilles moulders silently in the Trojan plain. The Horatian maxim of /nulli satis cautum/ recurs in the story of the ship, that had survived its sea-perils, burnt at last as it lay on shore near its native forest, and finding the ocean less faithless than the land.[14] In a different vein is the sarcastic praise of Fortune for her exaltation of a worthless man to high honour, "that she might shew her omnipotence."[15] At the root of all there is the sense, born of considering the flux of things and the tyranny of time, that man plays a losing game, and that his only success is in refusing to play. For the busy and idle, for the fortunate and unhappy alike, the sun rises one morning for the last time;[16] he only is to be congratulated who is done with hope and fear;[17] how short-lived soever he be in comparison with the world through which he passes, yet no less through time Fate dries up the holy springs, and the mighty cities of old days are undecipherable under the green turf;[18] it is the only wisdom to acquiesce in the forces, however ignorant or malign in their working, that listen to no protest and admit no appeal, that no force can affect, no subtlety elude, no calculation predetermine. ----------

[1] {to theion pan phthoneron te kai tarakhodes}, Hdt. i. 32.

[2] Anth. Pal. v. 74, 118.

[3] Ibid. xi. 53; xii. 32, 234.

[4] Anth. Pal. vii. 472.

[5] Ibid. xi. 25; xii. 50.

[6] Ibid. v. 85.

[7] Ibid. xi. 37.

[8] Ibid. x. 71.

[9] Ibid. ix. 51.

[10] Ibid. vii. 705, 723; ix. 28, 101-4, 151-6, 408.

[11] Anth. Pal. ix. 269.

[12] Ibid. ix. 138, 44, 75.

[13] ix. 19 in this selection.

[14] Anth. Pal. ix. 106.

[15] Ibid. ix. 530.

[16] Ibid. ix. 8.

[17] Ibid. ix. 172; xi. 282.

[18] Ibid. ix. 101, 257.

XIV

Of these prodigious natural forces the strongest and the most imposing is Death. Here, if anywhere, the Greek genius had its fullest scope and most decisive triumph; and here it is that we come upon the epigram in its inmost essence and utmost perfection. "Waiting to see the end" as it always did, the Greek spirit pronounced upon the end when it came with a swiftness, a tact, a certitude that leave all other language behind. For although Latin and not Greek is pre-eminently and without rival the proper and, one might almost say, the native language of monumental inscription, yet the little difference that fills inscriptions with imagination and beauty, and will not be content short of poetry, is in the Greek temper alone. The Roman sarcophagus, square hewn of rock, and bearing on it, incised for immortality, the haughty lines of rolling Republican names, represents to us with unequalled power the abstract majesty of human States and the glory of law and government; and the momentary pause in the steady current of the life of Rome, when one citizen dropped out of rank and another succeeded him, brings home to us with crushing effect, like some great sentence of Tacitus, the brief and transitory worth of a single life. /Qui apicem gessisti, mors perfecit tua ut essent omnia brevia, honos fama virtusque, gloria atque ingenium/[1]--words like these have a melancholy majesty that no other human speech has known; nor can any greater depth of pathos be reached than is in the two simple words /Bene merenti/ on a hundred Roman tombs. But the Greek mind here as elsewhere came more directly than any other face to face with the truth of things, and the Greek genius kindled before the vision of life and death into a clearer flame. The sepulchural reliefs show us many aspects of death; in all of the best period there is a common note, mingled of a grave tenderness, simplicity, and reserve. The quiet figures there take leave of one another with the same grace that their life had shown. There is none of the horror of darkness, none of the ugliness of dying; with calm faces and undisordered raiment they rise from their seats and take the last farewell. But the sepulchural verses show us more clearly how deep the grief was that lay beneath the quiet lines of the marble and the smooth cadence of the couplets. They cover and fill the whole range of emotion: household grief, and pain for the dead baby or the drowned lover, and the bitter parting of wife and husband, and the chill of distance and the doubt of the unknown nether world; and the thoughts of the bright and brief space of life, and the merciless continuity of nature, and the resolution of body and soul into the elements from which they came; and the uselessness of Death's impatience, and the bitter cry of a life gone like spilt water; and again, comfort out of the grave, perpetual placidity, "holy sleep," and earth's gratitude to her children, and beyond all, dimly and lightly drawn, the flowery meadows of Persephone, the great simplicity and rest of the other world, and far away a shadowy and beautiful country to which later men were to give the name of Heaven.

The famous sepulchral epigrams of Simonides deserve a word to themselves; for in them, among the most finished achievements of the greatest period of Greece, the art not only touches its highest recorded point, but a point beyond which it seems inconceivable that art should go. They stand with the odes of Pindar and the tragedies of Sophocles as the symbols of perfection in literature; not only from the faultlessness of their form, but from their greatness of spirit, the noble and simple thought that had then newly found itself so perfect a language to commemorate the great deeds which it inspired. Foremost among them are those on the men whose fame they can hardly exalt beyond the place given them by history; on the three hundred of Thermopylae, the Athenian dead at Marathon, the Athenian and Lacedaemonian dead at Plataea.[2] "O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here obeying their orders"--the words have grown so famous that it is only by sudden flashes that we can appreciate their greatness. No less noble are others somewhat less widely known: on the monument erected by the city of Corinth to the men who, when all Greece stood as near destruction as a knife's edge, helped to win her freedom at Salamis; on the Athenians, slain under the skirts of the Euboean hills, who lavished their young and beautiful lives for Athens; on the soldiers who fell, in the full tide of the Greek glory, at the great victory of the Eurymedon.[3] In all the epitaphs of this class the thought of the city swallows up individual feeling; for the city's sake, that she may be free and great, men offer their death as freely as their life; and the noblest end for a life spent in her service is to die in the moment of her victory. The funeral speech of Pericles dwells with all the amplitude of rhetoric on the glory of such a death; "having died they are not dead" are the simpler words of Simonides.[4]

Not less striking than these in their high simplicity are his epitaphs on private persons: that which preserves the fame of the great lady who was not lifted up to pride, Archedice daughter of Hippias; that on Theognis of Sinope, so piercing and yet so consoling in its quiet pathos, or that on Brotachus of Gortyn, the trader who came after merchandise and found death; the dying words of Timomachus and the eternal memory left to his father day by day of the goodness and wisdom of his dead child; the noble apostrophe to mount Gerania, where the drowned and nameless sailor met his doom, the first and one of the most magnificent of the long roll of poems on seafarers lost at sea.[5] In all of them the foremost quality is their simplicity of statement. There are no superlatives. The emotion is kept strictly in the background, neither expressed nor denied. Great minds of later ages sought a justification of the ways of death in denying that it brought any reasonable grief. To the cold and profound thought of Marcus Aurelius death is "a natural thing, like roses in spring or harvest in autumn."[6] But these are the words of a strange language. The feeling of Simonides is not, like theirs, abstract and remote; he offers no justification, because none is felt to be needed where the pain of death is absorbed in the ardour of life.

That great period passed away; and in those which follow it, the sepulchural inscription, while it retains the old simplicity, descends from those heights into more common feelings, lets loose emotion, even dallies with the ornaments of grief. The sorrow of death is spoken of freely; nor is there any poetry more pathetic than those epitaphs which, lovely in their sadness, commemorate the lost child, the sundered lovers, the disunited life. Among the most beautiful are those on children: on the baby that just lived, and, liking it not, went away again before it had known good or evil;[7] on the children of a house all struck down in one day and buried in one grave;[8] on the boy whom his parents could not keep, though they held both his little hands in theirs, led downward by the Angel of Death to the unsmiling land.[9] Then follows the keener sadness of the young life, spared till it opened into flower only to be cut down before noon; the girl who, sickening for her baby-brother, lost care for her playmates, and found no peace till she went to rejoin him;[10] the boy of twelve, with whom his father, adding no words of lamentation, lays his whole hope in the grave;[11] the cry of the mourning mother over her son, Bianor or Anticles, an only child laid on the funeral pyre before an only parent's eyes, leaving dawn thenceforth disadorned of her sweetness, and no comfort in the sun.[12] More piercing still in their sad sweetness are the epitaphs on young wives; on Anastasia, dead at sixteen, in the first year of her marriage, over whom the ferryman of the dead must needs mingle his own with her father's and her husband's tears; on Atthis of Cnidos, the wife who had never left her husband till this the first and last sundering came; on Paulina of Ravenna, holy of life and blameless, the young bride of the physician whose skill could not save her, but whose last testimony to her virtues has survived the wreck of the centuries that have made the city crumble and the very sea retire.[13] The tender feeling for children mingles with the bitter grief at their loss, a touch of fancy, as though they were flowers plucked by Persephone to be worn by her and light up the greyness of the underworld. Cleodicus, dead before the festival of this third birthday, when the child's hair was cut and he became a boy, lies in his little coffin; but somewhere by unknown Acheron a shadow of him grows fair and strong in youth, though he never may return to earth again.[14]

With the grief for loss comes the piercing cry over crushed beauty. One of the early epitaphs, written before the period of the Persian wars, is nothing but this cry: "pity him who was so beautiful and is dead."[15] In the same spirit is the fruitless appeal so often made over the haste of Death; /mais que te nuysoit elle en vie, mort?/ Was he not thine, even had he died an old man? says the mourner over Attalus.[16] A subject whose strange fascination drew artist after artist to repeat it, and covered the dreariness of death as with a glimmer of white blossoms, was Death the Bridegroom, the maiden taken away from life just as it was about to be made complete. Again and again the motive is treated with delicate profusion of detail, and lingering fancy draws out the sad likeness between the two torches that should hold such a space of lovely life between them,[17] now crushed violently together and mingling their fires. Already the bride-bed was spread with saffron in the gilded chamber; already the flutes were shrill by the doorway, and the bridal torches were lit, when Death entered, masked as a reveller, and the hymeneal song suddenly changed into the death-dirge; and while the kinsfolk were busy about another fire, Persephone lighted her own torch out of their hands; with hardly an outward change--as in a processional relief on a sarcophagus--the bridal train turns and moves to the grave with funeral lights flaring through the darkness and sobbing voices and wailing flutes.[18]

As tender in their fancy and with a higher note of sincerity in their grief are the epitaphs on young mothers, dead in childbirth: Athenaïs of Lesbos, the swift-footed, whose cry Artemis was too busy with her woodland hounds to hear; Polyxena, wife of Archelus, not a year's wife nor a month's mother, so short was all her time; Prexo, wife of Theocritus, who takes her baby with her, content with this, and gives blessings from her grave to all who will pray with her that the boy she leaves on earth may live into a great old age.[19] Here tenderness outweighs sorrow; in others a bitterer grief is uttered, the grief of one left alone, forsaken and cast off by all that had made life sweet; where the mother left childless among women has but the one prayer left, that she too may quickly go whence she came, or where the morbid imagination of a mourner over many deaths invents new forms of self- torture in the idea that her very touch is mortal to those whom she loves, and that fate has made her the instrument of its cruelty; or where Theano, dying alone in Phocaea, sends a last cry over the great gulfs of sea that divide her from her husband, and goes down into the night with the one passionate wish that she might have but died with her hand clasped in his hand.[20]

Into darkness, into silence: the magnificent brilliance of that ancient world, its fulness of speech and action, its copiousness of life, made the contrast more sudden and appalling; and it seems to be only at a later period, when the brightness was a little dimmed and the tide of life did not run so full, that the feeling grew up which regarded death as the giver of rest. With a last word of greeting to the bright earth the dying man departs, as into a mist.[21] In the cold shadows underground the ghost will not be comforted by ointments and garlands lavished on the tomb; though the clay covering be drenched with wine, the dead man will not drink.[22] On an island of the Aegean, set like a gem in the splendid sea, the boy lying under earth, far away from the sweet sun, asks a word of pity from those who go up and down, busy in the daylight, past his grave. Paula of Tarentum, the brief-fated, cries out passionately of the stone chambers of her night, the night that has hidden her. Samian girls set up a monument over their playfellow Crethis, the chatterer, the story- teller, whose lips will never open in speech again. Musa, the singing- girl, blue-eyed and sweet-voiced, suddenly lies voiceless, like a stone.[23] With a jarring shock, as of closed gates, the grave closes over sound and colour; /moved round in Earth's diurnal course with rocks, and stones, and trees./

Even thus there is some little comfort in lying under known earth; and the strangeness of a foreign grave adds a last touch to the pathos of exile. The Eretrians, captured by the Persian general Datis, and sent from their island home by endless marches into the heart of Asia, pine in the hot Cassian plains, and with their last voice from the tomb send out a greeting to the dear and distant sea.[24] The Athenian laid in earth by the far reaches of Nile, and the Egyptian whose tomb stands by a village of Crete, though from all places the descent to the house of Hades is one, yet grieve and fret at their strange resting-places.[25] No bitterer pang can be added to death than for the white bones of the dead to lie far away, washed by chill rains, or mouldering on a strange beach with the screaming seagulls above them.[26]

This last aspect of death was the one upon which the art of the epigrammatist lavished its utmost resources. From first to last the Greeks were a seafaring people, and death at sea was always present to them as a common occurrence. The Mediterranean was the great highway of the world's journeying and traffic. All winter through, travel almost ceased on it except for those who could not avoid it, and whom desire or gain or urgence of business drove forth across stormy and perilous waters; with spring there came, year by year, a sort of breaking-up of the frost, and the seas were all at once covered with a swarm of shipping. From Egypt and Syria fleets bore the produce of the East westward; from the pillars of Hercules galleys came laden with the precious ores of Spain and Britain; through the Propontis streamed the long convoys of corn-ships from the Euxine with their loads of wheat. Across the Aegean from island to island, along its shores from port to port, ran continually the tide of local commerce, the crowds of tourists and emigrants, the masses of people and merchandise drawn hither and thither in the track of armies, or bound to and from shows and festivals and markets. The fishing industry, at least in the later Greek period, employed the whole population of small islands and seaside towns. Among those thousands of vessels many must, every year, have come to harm in those difficult channels and treacherous seas. And death at sea had a great horror and anguish attached to it; the engulfing in darkness, the vain struggles for life, the loss of burial rites and all the last offices that can be paid to death, made it none the less terrible that it was so common. From the Odyssey downward tales of sea-peril and shipwreck had the most powerful fascination. Yet to that race of sailors the sea always remained in a manner hateful; "as much as a mother is sweeter than a stepmother," says Antipater,[27] "so much is earth dearer than the dark sea." The fisherman tossing on the waves looked back with envy to the shepherd, who, though his life was no less hard, could sit in quiet piping to his flock on the green hillside; the great merchantman who crossed the whole length of the Mediterranean on his traffic, or even ventured out beyond Calpe into the unknown ocean, hungered for the peace of broad lands, the lowing of herds.[28] /Cedet et ipse mari vector, nec nautica pinus mutabit merces/: all dreams of a golden age, or of an ideal life in an actual world, included in them the release from this weary and faithless element. Even in death it would not allow its victims rest; the cry of the drowned man is that though kind hands have given him burial on the beach, even there the ceaseless thunder of the surge is in his ears, and the roar of the surf under the broken reef will not let him be quiet; "keep back but twelve feet from me," is his last prayer, "and there billow and roar as much as thou wilt."[29] But even the grace of a tomb was often denied. In the desolation of unknown distances the sailor sank into the gulfs or was flung on a desert beach. Erasippus, perished with his ship, has all the ocean for his grave; somewhere far away his white bones moulder on a spot that the seagulls alone can tell. Thymodes rears a cenotaph to his son, who on some Bithynian beach or island of the Pontic lies a naked corpse on an inhospitable shore. Young Seleucus, wrecked in the distant Atlantic, has long been dead on the trackless Spanish coasts, while yet at home in Lesbos they praise him and look forward to his return. On the thirsty uplands of Dryopia the empty earth is heaped up that does not cover Polymedes, tossed up and down far from stony Trachis on the surge of the Icarian sea. "Also thee, O Cleanoridas," one abruptly opens, the thought of all those many others whom the sea had swallowed down overwhelming him as he tells the fate of the drowned man.[30] The ocean never forgot its cruelty. {Pasa thalassa thalassa}, "everywhere the sea is the sea," wails Aristagoras,[31] past the perilous Cyclades and the foaming narrows of the Hellespont only to be drowned in a little Locrian harbour; the very sound of the words echoes the heavy wash of blind waves and the hissing of eternal foam. Already in sight of home, like Odysseus on his voyage from Aeolia, the sailor says to himself, "to-morrow the long battle against contrary winds will be over," when the storm gathers as the words leave his lips, and he is swept back to death.[32] The rash mariner who trusts the gale of winter draws fate on himself with his own hands; Cleonicus, hastening home to Thasos with his merchandise from Hollow Syria at the setting of the Pleiad, sinks with the sinking star.[33] But even in the days of the halcyons, when the sea should stand like a sheet of molten glass, the terrible straits swallow Aristomenes, with ship and crew; and Nicophemus perishes, not in wintry waves, but of thirst in a calm on the smooth and merciless Lybian sea.[34] By harbours and headlands stood the graves of drowned men with pathetic words of warning or counsel. "I am the tomb of one shipwrecked"; in these words again and again the verses begin. What follows is sometimes an appeal to others to take example: "let him have only his own hardihood to blame, who looses moorings from my grave"; sometimes it is a call to courage: "I perished; yet even then other ships sailed safely on." Another, in words incomparable for their perfect pathos and utter simplicity, neither counsels nor warns: "O mariners, well be with you at sea and on land; but know that you pass the tomb of a shipwrecked man." And in the same spirit another sends a blessing out of his nameless tomb: "O sailor, ask not whose grave I am, but be thine own fortune a kinder sea."[35]