Chapter VIII: Section IV: , together with what was not already classed, fell (3)

Beyond this simplicity and pathos cannot reach. But there is a group of three epigrams yet unmentioned[36] which, in their union of these qualities with the most severe magnificence of language and with the poignant and vivid emotion of a tragical Border ballad, reach an even more amazing height: that where Ariston of Cyrene, lying dead by the Icarian rocks, cries out in passionate urgency on mariners who go sailing by to tell Meno how his son perished; that where the tomb of Biton in the morning sun, under the walls of Torone, sends a like message by the traveller to the childless father, Nicagoras of Amphipolis; and most piercing of all in their sorrow and most splendid in their cadences, the stately lines that tell the passer-by of Polyanthus, sunk off Sciathus in the stormy Aegean, and laid in his grave by the young wife to whom only a dead body was brought home by the fishermen as they sailed into harbour under a flaring and windy dawn.

Less numerous than these poems of sea-sorrow, but with the same trouble of darkness, the same haunting chill, are others where death comes through the gloom of wet nights, in the snowstorm or the thunderstorm or the autumn rains that drown the meadow and swell the ford. The contrast of long golden summer days may perhaps make the tidings of death more pathetic, and wake a more delicate pity; but the physical horror, as in the sea-pieces, is keener at the thought of lonely darkness, and storm in the night. Few pictures can be more vivid than that of the oxen coming unherded down the hill through the heavy snow at dusk, while high on the mountain side their master lies dead, struck by lightning; or of Ion, who slipped overboard, unnoticed in the darkness, while the sailors drank late into night at their anchorage; or of the strayed revellers, Orthon and Polyxenus, who, bewildered in the rainy night, with the lights of the banquet still flaring in their eyes, stumbled on the slippery hill-path and lay dead at the foot of the cliff.[37]

/O Charides, what is there beneath?/ cries a passer-by over the grave of one who had in life nursed his hopes on the doctrine of Pythagoras; and out of the grave comes the sombre answer, /Great darkness/.[38] It is in this feeling that the brooding over death in later Greek literature issues; under the Roman empire we feel that we have left the ancient world and are on the brink of the Middle Ages with their half hysterical feeling about death, the piteous and ineffectual revolt against it, and the malign fascination with which it preys on men's minds and paralyses their action. To the sombre imagination of an exhausted race the generations of mankind were like bands of victims dragged one after another to the slaughter-house; in Palladas and his contemporaries the medieval dance of death is begun.[39] The great and simple view of death is wholly broken up, with the usual loss and gain that comes of analysis. On the one hand is developed this tremulous and cowardly shrinking from the law of nature. But on the other there arises in compensation the view of death as final peace, the release from trouble, the end of wandering, the resolution of the feverous life of man into the placid and continuous life of nature. With a great loss of strength and directness comes an increased measure of gentleness and humanity. Poetry loves to linger over the thought of peaceful graves. The dead boy's resting-place by the spring under the poplars bids the weary wayfarer turn aside and drink in the shade, and remember the quiet place when he is far away.[40] The aged gardener lies at peace under the land that he had laboured for many a year, and in recompence of his fruitful toil over vine and olive, corn-field and orchard-plot, grateful earth lies lightly over his grey temples, and the earliest flowers of spring blossom above his dust.[41] The lovely lines of Leonidas,[42] in which Clitagoras asks that when he is dead the sheep may bleat over him, and the shepherd pipe from the rock as they graze softly along the valley, and that the countryman in spring may pluck a posy of meadow flowers and lay it on his grave, have all the tenderness of an English pastoral in a land of soft outlines and silvery tones. An intenser feeling for nature and a more consoling peace is in the nameless poem that bids the hill-brooks and the cool upland pastures tell the bees, when they go forth anew on their flowery way, that their old keeper fell asleep on a winter night, and will not come back with spring.[43] The lines call to mind that magnificent passage of the /Adonais/ where the thought of earth's annual resurrection calms by its glory and beauty the very sorrow which it rekindles; as those others, where, since the Malian fowler is gone, the sweet plane again offers her branches "for the holy bird to rest his swift wings,"[44] are echoed in the famous Ode where the note of the immortal bird sets the listener in the darkness at peace with Death. The dying man leaves earth with a last kind word. At rest from long wanderings, the woman, whose early memory went back to the storming of Athens by Roman legionaries, and whose later life had passed from Italy to Asia, unites the lands of her birth and adoption and decease in her farewell.[45] For all ranks and ages--the baby gone to be a flower in Persephone's crowned hair, the young scholar, dear to men and dearer to the Muses, the great sage who, from the seclusion of his Alexandrian library, has seen three kings succeed to the throne[46]-- the recompense of life is peace. Peace is on the graves of the good servant, the faithful nurse, the slave who does not even in the tomb forget his master's kindness or cease to help him at need.[47] Even the pets of the household, the dog or the singing-bird, or the caged cricket shouting through the warm day, have their reward in death, their slight memorial and their lasting rest. The shrill cicala, silent and no more looked on by the sun, finds a place in the meadows whose flowers the Queen of the Dead herself keeps bright with dew.[48] The sweet-throated song-bird, the faithful watch-dog who kept the house from harm, the speckled partridge in the coppice,[49] go at the appointed time upon their silent way--/ipsas angusti terminus aevi excipit/--and come into human sympathy because their bright life is taken to its rest like man's own in so brief a term.

Before this gentler view of death grief itself becomes softened. "Fare thou well even in the house of Hades," says the friend over the grave of the friend: the words are the same as those of Achilles over Patroclus, but all the wild anguish has gone out of them.[50] Over the ashes of Theognis of Sinope, without a word of sorrow, with hardly a pang of pain, Glaucus sets a stone in memory of the companionship of many years. And in the tenderest and most placid of epitaphs on dead friends doubt vanishes with grief and acquiescence passes into hope, as the survivor of that union "which conquers Time indeed, and is eternal, separate from fears," prays Sabinus, if it be permitted, not even among the dead to let the severing water of Lethe pass his lips.[51]

Out of peace comes the fruit of blessing. The drowned sailor rests the easier in his grave that the lines written over it bid better fortune to others who adventure the sea. "Go thou upon thy business and obtain thy desire,"[52] says the dead man to the passer-by, and the kind word makes the weight of his own darkness less to bear. Amazonia of Thessalonica from her tomb bids husband and children cease their lamentations and be only glad while they remember her.[53] Such recompence is in death that the dead sailor or shepherd becomes thenceforth the genius of the shore or the hillside.[54] The sacred sleep under earth sends forth a vague and dim effluence; in a sort of trance between life and death the good still are good and do not wholly cease out of being.[55]

For the doctrine of immortality did not dawn upon the world at any single time or from any single quarter. We are accustomed, perhaps, to think of it as though it came like sunrise out of the dark, /lux sedentibus in tenebris/, giving a new sense to mankind and throwing over the whole breadth of life a vivid severance of light from shadow, putting colour and sharp form into what had till then all lain dim in the dusk, like Virgil's woodland path under the glimpses of a fitful moon. Rather it may be compared to those scattered lights that watchers from Mount Ida were said to discern moving hither and thither in the darkness, and at last slowly gathering and kindling into the clear pallor of dawn.[56] So it is that those half-formed beliefs, those hints and longings, still touch us with the freshness of our own experience. For the ages of faith, if such there be, have not yet come; still in the mysterious glimmer of a doubtful light men wait for the coming of the unrisen sun. During a brief and brilliant period the splendour of corporate life had absorbed the life of the citizen; an Athenian of the age of Pericles may have, for the moment, found Athens all-sufficient to his needs. With the decay of that glory it became plain that this single life was insufficient, that it failed in permanence and simplicity. We all dwell in a single native country, the universe, said Meleager,[57] expressing a feeling that had become the common heritage of his race. But that country, as men saw it, was but ill governed; and in nothing more so than in the rewards and punishments it gave to its citizens. To regard it as the vestibule only of another country where life should have its intricacies simplified, its injustices remedied, its evanescent beauty fixed, and its brief joy made full, became an imperious instinct that claimed satisfaction, through definite religious teaching or the dreams of philosophy or the visions of poetry. And so the last words of Greek sepulchral poetry express, through questions and doubts, in metaphor and allegory, the final belief in some blessedness beyond death. Who knows whether to live be not death, and to be dead life? so the haunting hope begins. The Master of the Portico died young; does he sleep in the quiet embrace of earth, or live in the joy of the other world?[58] "Even in life what makes each one of us to be what we are is only the soul; and when we are dead, the bodies of the dead are rightly said to be our shades or images; for the true and immortal being of each one of us, which is called the soul, goes on her way to other gods, that before them she may give an account."[59] These are the final words left to men by that superb and profound genius the dream of whose youth had ended in the flawless lines[60] whose music Shelley's own could scarcely render:

Thou wert the Morning Star among the living
Ere thy fair light was fled;
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
New splendour to the dead.

And at last, not from the pen of Plato nor written in lines of gold, but set by a half-forgotten friend over an obscure grave,[61] comes the certitude of that long hope. Heliodorus and Diogeneia died on the same day and are buried under the same stone: but love admits no such bar to its continuance, and the tomb is as a bridal chamber for their triumphant life. ----------

[1] From the inscription on the tomb of Publius Cornelius Scipio
Africanus, Augur and Flamen Dialis, son of the conqueror of
Hannibal.

[2] Anth. Pal. vii. 249, 251, 253; Aristides, ii. 511.

[3] Aristides, ii. 512; App. Plan. 26; Anth. Pal. vii. 258.

[4] Anth. Pal. vii. 251; Thuc. ii. 41-43.

[5] Thuc. vi. 59; Anth. Pal. vii. 509, 254, 513, 496.

[6] Marc. Aur. iv. 44.

[7] Kaibel, 576.

[8] Anth. Pal. vii. 474.

[9] iii. 33 in this selection.

[10] Anth. Pal. vii. 662.

[11] Ibid. vii. 453.

[12] Ibid. vii. 261, 466.

[13] Ibid. vii. 600; Kaibel, 204 B, 596.

[14] Anth. Pal. vii. 482, 483.

[15] Kaibel, 1 A.

[16] Anth. Pal. vii. 671.

[17] Propertius, IV. xii. 46.

[18] Anth. Pal. vii. 182, 185, 711, 712.

[19] Ibid. vi. 438, vii. 167, 163.

[20] Ibid. vii. 466, ix. 254, vii. 735.

[21] Anth. Pal. vii. 566.

[22] Ibid. xi. 8.

[23] Kaibel, 190; Anth. Pal. vii. 700, 459; C. I. G., 6261.

[24] Anth. Pal. vii. 256, 259.

[25] Ibid. vii. 477, x. 3.

[26] Ibid. vii. 225, 285.

[27] Anth. Pal. ix. 23.

[28] Anth. Pal. vii. 636, ix. 7; cf. Virgil, Georg. ii. 468-70.

[29] Ibid. vii. 284.

[30] Ibid. vii. 285, 497, 376, 651, 263.

[31] Ibid. vii. 639.

[32] Ibid. vii. 630.

[33] Anth. Pal. vii. 263, 534.

[34] Ibid. ix. 271, vii. 293.

[35] Ibid. vii. 264, 282, 675; 269, 350.

[36] Ibid. vii. 499, 502, 739.

[37] Anth. Pal. vii. 173, ix. 82, vii. 398, 660.

[38] Ibid. vii. 524.

[39] Cf. Ibid. x. 78, 85, 88, xi. 300.

[40] Anth. Pal. ix. 315.

[41] Ibid. vii. 321.

[42] Ibid. vii. 657. The spirit, and much of the language, of these
epigrams is very like that of Gray's /Elegy/.

[43] Ibid. vii. 717.

[44] Ibid. vii. 171.

[45] Ibid. vii. 368.

[46] Anth. Pal. 78, 483; Diog. Laert. iv. 25.

[47] Ibid. vii. 178, 179; Kaibel, 47.

[48] Ibid. vii. 189.

[49] Ibid. vii. 199, 211, 203.

[50] Il. xxiii. 19; Anth. Pal. vii. 41.

[51] Ibid. vii. 509, 346.

[52] Kaibel, 190.

[53] Anth. Pal. vii. 667.

[54] Ibid. vii. 269, 657.

[55] Ibid. vii. 451.

[56] Lucr. v. 663.

[57] Anth. Pal. vii. 417.

[58] Infra, xi. 7.

[59] Plato, /Laws/, 959.

[60] Anth. Pal. vii. 670.

[61] Ibid. vii. 378, {agallomenoi kai taphon os thalamon}.

XV

Criticism, to be made effectively, must be made from beyond and outside the thing criticised. But as regards life itself, such an effort of abstraction is more than human. For the most part poetry looks on life from a point inside it, and the total view differs, or may even be reversed, with the position of the observer. The shifting of perspective makes things appear variously both in themselves and in their proportion to other things. What lies behind one person is before another; the less object, if nearer, may eclipse the greater; where there is no fixed standard of reference, how can it be determined what is real and what apparent, or whether there be any absolute fact at all? To some few among men it has been granted to look on life as it were from without, with vision unaffected by the limit of view and the rapid shifting of place. These, the poets who see life steadily and whole, in Matthew Arnold's celebrated phrase, are for the rest of mankind almost divine. We recognise them as such through a sort of instinct awakened by theirs and responding to it, through the inarticulate divinity of which we are all in some degree partakers.

These are the great poets; and we do not look, in any Anthology of slight and fugitive pieces, for so broad and sustained a view of life. But what we do find in the Anthology is the reflection in many epigrams of many partial criticisms from within; the expression, in the most brief and pointed form, of the total effect that life had on one man or another at certain moments, whether in the heat of blood, or the first melancholy of youth, or the graver regard of mature years. In nearly all the same sad note recurs, of the shortness of life, of the inevitableness of death. Now death is the shadow at the feast, bidding men make haste to drink before the cup is snatched from their lips with its sweetness yet undrained; again it is the bitterness within the cup itself, the lump of salt dissolving in the honeyed wine and spoiling the drink. Then comes the revolt against the cruel law of Nature in the crude thought of undisciplined minds. Sometimes this results in hard cynicism, sometimes in the relaxation of all effort; now and then the bitterness grows so deep that it almost takes the quality of a real philosophy, a nihilism, to use the barbarous term of our own day, that declares itself as a positive solution of the whole problem. "Little is the life of our rejoicing," cries Rufinus,[1] in the very words of an English ballad of the fifteenth century; "old age comes quickly, and death ends all." In many epigrams this burden is repeated. The philosophy is that of Ecclesiastes: "Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, let thy garments be always white, and let thy head lack no ointment; see life with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity; for that is thy portion in life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun." If the irony here is unintentional it is all the bitterer; such consolation leads surely to a more profound gloom. With a selfish nature this view of life becomes degraded into cynical effrontery; under the Roman empire the lowest corruption of "good manners" took for its motto the famous words, repeated in an anonymous epigram,[2] Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. In finer tempers it issues in a mood strangely mingled of weakness of will and lucidity of intelligence, like that of Omar Khayyam. Many of the stanzas of the Persian poet have a close parallel, not only in thought but in actual turn of phrase, in verses of the later epigrammatists.[3] The briefness of life when first realised makes youth feverish and self-absorbed. "Other men perhaps will be, but /I/ shall be dead and turned into black earth"--as though that were the one thing of importance.[4] Or again, the beauty of returning spring is felt in the blood as an imperious call to renew the delight in the simplest physical pleasures, food and scent of flowers and walks in the fresh country air, and to thrust away the wintry thought of dead friends who cannot share those delights now.[5] The earliest form taken by the instinct of self-preservation and the revolt against death can hardly be called by a milder name than swaggering. "I don't care," the young man cries,[6] with a sort of faltering bravado. Snatch the pleasure of the moment, such is the selfish instinct of man before his first imagination of life, and then, and then let fate do its will upon you.[7] Thereafter, as the first turbulence of youth passes, its first sadness succeeds, with the thought of all who have gone before and all who are to follow, and of the long night of silence under the ground. Touches of tenderness break in upon the reveller; thoughts of the kinship of earth, as the drinker lifts the sweet cup wrought of the same clay as he; submission to the lot of mortality; counsels to be generous while life lasts, "to give and to share"; the renunciation of gross ambitions such as wealth and power, with some likeness or shadow in it of the crowning virtue of humility.[8]

It is here that the change begins. To renounce something for the first time wittingly and spontaneously is an action of supreme importance, and its consequences reach over the whole of life. Not only is it that he who has renounced one thing has shown himself implicitly capable of renouncing all things: he has shown much more; reflection, choice, will. Thenceforth he is able to see part of life at all events from outside, the part which he has put away from himself; for the first time his criticism of life begins to be real. He has no longer a mere feeling with regard to the laws of nature, whether eager haste or sullen submission or blind revolt; behind the feeling there is now thought, the power which makes and unmakes all things.

And so in mature age Greek thought began to make criticisms on life; and of these the Anthology preserves and crystallises many brilliant fragments. Perhaps there is no thought among them which was even then original; certainly there is none which is not now more or less familiar. But the perfected expression without which thought remains obscure and ineffectual gives some of them a value as enduring as their charm. A few of them are here set side by side without comment, for no comment is needed to make their sense clear, nor to give weight to their grave and penetrating reality.[9]

"Those who have left the sweet light I mourn no longer, but those who live in perpetual expectation of death."

"What belongs to mortals is mortal, and all things pass by us; and if not, yet we pass by them."

"Now we flourish, as others did before, and others will presently, whose children we shall not see."

"I weep not for thee, dearest friend; for thou knewest much good; and likewise God dealt thee thy share of ill."

These epigrams in their clear and unimpassioned brevity are a type of the Greek temper in the age of reflection. Many others, less simple in their language, less crystalline in their structure, have the same quiet sadness in their tone. As it is said in the solemn and monumental line of Menander, sorrow and life are too surely akin.[10] The vanity of earthly labour; the deep sorrow over the passing of youth; the utter loss and annihilation of past time with all that it held of action and suffering; the bitterness of the fear of death, and the weariness of the clutch at life; such are among the thoughts of most frequent recurrence. In one view these are the commonplaces of literature; yet they are none the less the expression of the profoundest thought of mankind.

In Greek literature from first to last the view of life taken by the most serious thinkers was grave and sad. Not in one age or in one form of poetry alone, but in most that are of great import, the feeling that death was better than life is no mere caprice of melancholy, but a settled conviction. The terrible words of Zeus in the Iliad to the horses of Achilles,[11] "for there is nothing more pitiable than man, of all things that breathe and move on earth," represent the Greek criticism of life already mature and consummate. "Best of all is it for men not to be born," says Theognis in lines whose calm perfection has no trace of passion or resentment,[12] "and if born, to pass inside Hades-gates as quickly as may be." Echoing these lines of the Megarian poet, Sophocles at eighty, the most fortunate in his long and brilliant life of all his contemporaries in an age the most splendid that the world has ever witnessed, utters with the weight of a testamentory declaration the words that thrill us even now by their faultless cadence and majestic music;[13] "Not to be born excels on the whole account; and for him who has seen the light to go whence he came as soon as may be is next best by far." And in another line,[14] whose rhythm is the sighing of all the world made audible, "For there is no such pain," he says, "as length of life." So too the humane and accomplished Menander, in the most striking of all the fragments preserved from his world of comedies,[15] weighs and puts aside all the attractions that life can offer: "Him I call most happy who, having gazed without grief on these august things, the common sun, the stars, water, clouds, fire, goes quickly back whence he came." With so clear-sighted and so sombre a view of this life and with no certainty of another, it was only the inspiration of great thought and action, and the gladness of yet unexhausted youth, that sustained the ancient world so long. And this gladness of youth faded away. Throughout all the writing of the later classical period we feel one thing constantly; that life was without joy. Alike in history and poetry, alike in the Eastern and Western worlds, a settled gloom deepens into night. The one desire left is for rest. Life is brief, as men of old time said; but now there is scarcely a wish that it should be longer. "Little is thy life and afflicted," says Leonidas,[16] "and not even so is it sweet, but more bitter than loathed death." "Weeping I was born, and when I have done my weeping I die," another poet wails,[17] "and all my life is among many tears." Aesopus is in a strait betwixt two; if one might but escape from life without the horror of dying! for now it is only the revolt from death that keeps him in the anguish of life.[18] To Palladas of Alexandria the world is but a slaughter- house, and death is its blind and irresponsible lord.[19]

From the name of Palladas is inseparable the name of the famous Hypatia, and the strange history of the Neo-Platonic school. The last glimmer of light in the ancient world was from the embers of their philosophy. A few late epigrams preserve a record of their mystical doctrines, and speak in half-unintelligible language of "the one hope" that went among them, a veiled and crowned phantom, under the name of Wisdom. But, apart from those lingering relics of a faith among men half dreamers and half charlatans, patience and silence were the only two counsels left for the dying ancient world; patience, in which we imitate God himself; silence, in which all our words must soon end.[20] The Roman empire perished, it has been said, for want of men; Greek literature perished for want of anything to say; or rather, because it found nothing in the end worth saying. Its end was like that recorded of the noblest of the Roman emperors;[21] the last word uttered with its dying breath was the counsel of equanimity. Men had once been comforted for their own life and death in the thought of deathless memorials; now they had lost hope, and declared that no words and no gods could give immortality.[22] Resignation[23] was the one lesson left to ancient literature, and, this lesson once fully learned, it naturally and silently died. All know how the ages that followed were too preoccupied to think of writings its epitaph. For century after century Goth and Hun, Lombard and Frank, Bulgarian and Avar, Norman and Saracen, Catalan and Turk rolled on in a ceaseless storm of slaughter and rapine without; for century after century within raged no less fiercely the unending fury of the new theology. Filtered down through Byzantine epitomes, through Arabic translations, through every sort of strange and tortuous channel, a vague and distorted tradition of this great literature just survived long enough to kindle the imagination of the fifteenth century. The chance of history, fortunate perhaps for the whole world, swept the last Greek scholars away from Constantinople to the living soil of Italy, carrying with them the priceless relics of forgotten splendours. To some broken stones, and to the chance which saved a few hundred manuscripts from destruction, is due such knowledge as we have to-day of that Greek thought and life which still remains to us in many ways an unapproached ideal. ----------

[1] Anth. Pal. v. 12; cf. the beautiful lyric with the refrain /Lytyll
ioye is son done/ (Percy Society, 1847).

[2] Anth. Pal. xi. 56.

[3] Cf. Ibid. xi. 25, 43; xii. 50.

[4] Theognis, 877, Bergk.

[5] Anth. Pal. ix. 412.

[6] Ibid. xi. 23.

[7] Archestr. ap. Athenaeum, vii. 286 a; {kan apothneskein melles,
arpason, . . kata usteron eoe o ti soi pepromenon estin}.

[8] Anth. Pal. xi. 3, 43, 56.

[9] Infra, xii. 19, 31, 24, 21.

[10] Citharist. Fr. 1, {ar esti suggenes to lupe kai bios}.

[11] Il. xvii. 443-447.

[12] Theognis, 425-8, Bergk.

[13] Oed. Col. 1225-8.

[14] Fr. Scyr. 500.

[15] Hypobolimaeus, Fr. 2.

[16] Anth. Pal. vii. 472.

[17] Ibid. x. 84.

[18] Ibid. x. 123.

[19] Ibid. x. 85.

[20] Ibid. x. 94, xi. 300.

[21] /Signum/ Aequanimitatis /dedit atque ita conversus quasi dormiret
spiritum reddidit./ Jul. Capitol., /Antoninus Pius/, c. xii.

[22] Anth. Pal. vii. 300, 362.

[23] {Esukhien agapan}, Ibid. x. 77.

XVI

That ancient world perished; and all the while, side by side with it, a new world was growing up with which it had so little in common that hitherto it would only have been confusing to take the latter much into account. This review of the older civilisation has, so far as may be, been kept apart from all that is implied by the introduction of Christianity; it has even spoken of the decay and death of literature, though literature and thought in another field were never more active than in the early centuries of the Church. Of the immense gain that came then to the world it is not necessary to speak; we all know it. For the latter half of the period of human history over which the Greek Anthology stretches, this new world was in truth the more important of the two. While to the ageing Greek mind life had already lost its joy, and thought begun to sicken, we hear the first notes of a new glory and passion;

{Egeire o katheudon
Kai anasta ek ton vekron
Kai epiphausei soi o KHristos}[1]--

in this broken fragment of shapeless and barbaric verse, not in the smooth and delicate couplets of contemporary poets, Polyaenus or Antiphilus, lay the germ of the music which was to charm the centuries that followed. Even through the long swoon of art which is usually thought of as following the darkness of the third century, the truth was that art was transforming itself into new shapes and learning a new language. The last words of the Neo-Platonic philosophy with its mystical wisdom were barely said when the Church of the Holy Wisdom rose in Constantinople, the most perfect work of art that has yet been known in organic beauty of design and splendour of ornament; and when Justinian by his closure of the schools of Athens marked off, as by a precise line, the end of the ancient world, in the Greek monasteries of Athos new types of beauty were being slowly wrought out which passed outward from land to land, transfiguring the face of the world as they went, kindling new life wherever they fell, miraculously transformed by the separate genius of every country from Norway to India, creating in Italy the whole of the great medieval art that stretches from Duccio and Giotto to Signorelli, and leaving to us here, as our most precious inheritances, such mere blurred and broken fragments of their glories as the cathedral churches of Salisbury and Winchester.

It is only in the growth and life of that new world that the decay and death of the old can be regarded with equanimity, or can in a certain sense be historically justified: for Greek civilisation was and still is so incomparable and so precious that its loss might otherwise fill the mind with despair, and seem to be the last irony cast by fate against the idea of human progress. But it is the law of all Nature, from her highest works to her lowest, that life only comes by death; "she replenishes one thing out of another," in the words of the Roman poet, "and does not suffer anything to be begotten before she has been recruited by the death of something else." To all things born she comes one day with her imperious message: /materies opus est ut crescant postera secla/.[2] With the infinite patience of one who has inexhaustible time and imperishable material at her absolute command, slowly, vacillatingly, not hesitating at any waste or any cruelty, Nature works out some form till it approaches perfection; then finds it flawed, finds it is not the thing she meant, and with the same strong, unscrupulous and passionless action breaks it up and begins anew. As in our own lives we sometimes feel that the slow progress of years, the structure built up cell by cell through pain and patience and weariness at lavish cost seems one day, when some great new force enters our life, to begin to crumble and fall away from us, and leave us strangers in a new world, so it is with the greater types of life, with peoples and civilisations; some secret inherent flaw was in their structure; they meet a trial for which they were not prepared, and fail; once more they must be passed into the crucible and melted down to their primitive matter. Yet Nature does not repeat herself; in some way the experience of all past generations enters into those which succeed them, and of a million of her works that have perished not one has perished wholly without account. That Greece and Rome, though they passed away, still influence us daily is indeed obvious; but it is as certain that the great races before them, of which Babylonia, Phoenicia, Egypt are only a few out of many, still live in the gradual evolution of the purpose of history. They live in us indeed as blind inherited forces, apart from our knowledge of them; yet if we can at all realise any of them to ourselves, at all enter into their spirit, our gain is great; for through time and distance they have become simple and almost abstract; only what was most living in them survives; and the loss of the vivid multiplicity and colour of a fuller knowledge makes it easier to discriminate what was important in them. Lapse of time has done for us with some portions of the past what is so difficult or even impossible for us to do for ourselves with the life actually round us, projected them upon an ideal plane: how ideal, in the case of Greek history, is obvious if we consider for a moment how nearly Homer and Herodotus are read alike by us. For Homer's world was from the first imagined, not actual; yet the actual world of the fifth century B.C. has become for us now no less an ideal, perhaps one which is even more stimulating and more fascinating. How far this may be due to any inherent excellence of its own, how far to the subtle enchantment of association, does not affect this argument. Of histories no less than of poems is it true that the best are but shadows, and that, for the highest purposes which history serves, the idea is the fact; the impression produced on us, the heightening and ennobling influence of a life, ideal or actual, akin to and yet different from ours, is the one thing which primarily matters. And so it may be questioned whether so far as this, the vital part of human culture, is concerned, modern scholarship has helped men beyond the point already reached by the more imperfect knowledge and more vivid intuitions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; for if the effect produced on them, in the way of heightening and ennobling life, was more than the effect now and here produced on us, we have, so far as the Greek world is concerned, lost and not gained. Compensations indeed there are; a vast experience has enlarged our horizon and deepened our emotion, and it would be absurd to say now, as was once truly and plausibly said, that Greek means culture. Yet even now we could ill do without it; nor does there seem any reason beyond the dulness of our imagination and the imperfection of our teaching why it should not be as true and as living a help as ever in our lives.

At the present day the risk is not of Greek art and literature being too little studied, but of their being studied in too contracted and formal a spirit. Less time is spent on the corruptions of medieval texts, and on the imbecilities of the decadence; but all the more is labour wasted and insight obscured by the new pedantry; the research into unimportant origins which the Greeks themselves wisely left covered in a mist of mythology. The destruction dealt on the Athenian acropolis, under the name of scholarship, is a type of modern practice. The history of two thousand years has so far as possible been swept carelessly away in the futile attempt to lay bare an isolated picture of the age of Pericles; now archaeologists find that they cannot stop there, and fix their interest on the shapeless fragments of barbaric art beneath. But the Greek spirit and temper is perhaps less known than it once was; there appears to be a real danger that the influence upon men, the surprise of joy once given them by the work of Sophocles or Pheidias or Plato, dwindles with the accumulation of importance given to the barbarous antecedents and surroundings from which that great art sprang. The highest office of history is to preserve ideals; and where the ideal is saved its substructure may well be allowed to perish, as perish in the main it must, in spite of all that we can recover from the slight and ambiguous records which it leaves. The value of this selection of minor poetry--if one can speak of a value in poetry beyond itself--is that, however imperfectly, it draws for us in little a picture of the Greek ideal with all its virtues and its failings: it may be taken as an epitome, slightly sketched with a facile hand, of the book of Greek life. How slight the material is in which this picture is drawn becomes plain the moment we turn from these epigrams, however delicate and graceful, to the great writers. Yet the very study of the lesser and the appreciation that comes of study may quicken our understanding of the greater; and there is something more moving and pathetic in their survival, as of flowers from a strange land: white violets gathered in the morning, to recur to Meleager's exquisite metaphor, yielding still a faint and fugitive fragrance here in the never-ending afternoon. ----------

[1] Quoted by S. Paul, Eph. v. 14.

[2] Lucr. i. 263, iii. 967.

ANTHOLOGY

TEXT AND TRANSLATIONS