Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology Part 11

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 pa.s.sion;

{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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionless 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociation, 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 enn.o.bling 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 enn.o.bling 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 acc.u.mulation 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

CHAPTER I

LOVE

I PRELUDE POSIDIPPUS

Jar of Athens, drip the dewy juice of wine, drip, let the feast to which all bring their share be wetted as with dew; be silenced the swan, sage Zeno, and the Muse of Cleanthes, and let bitter-sweet Love be our concern.

II LAUS VENERIS ASCLEPIADES

Sweet is snow in summer for the thirsty to drink, and sweet for sailors after winter to see the garland of spring; but most sweet when one cloak shelters two lovers, and the tale of love is told by both.

III LOVE'S SWEETNESS NOSSIS

Nothing is sweeter than love, and all delicious things are second to it; yes, even honey I spit out of my mouth. Thus saith Nossis; but he whom the Cyprian loves not, knows not what roses her flowers are.

IV LOVE AND THE SCHOLAR MARCUS ARGENTARIUS

Once when turning over the Book of Hesiod in my hands, suddenly I saw Pyrrha coming in; and casting the book to the ground from my hand, I cried out, Why bring your works to me, old Hesiod?

V LOVERS' LIPS PLATO

Kissing Agathon, I had my soul upon my lips; for it rose, poor wretch, as though to cross over.

VI THE FIRST KISS STRATO

At evening, at the hour when we say good-night, Moeris kissed me, I know not whether really or in a dream; for very clearly I now have the rest in mind, all she said to me, and all that she asked me of; but whether she kissed me too, I doubt and guess; for if it is true, how, after being set in heaven, do I go to and fro upon earth?

VII THE REVELLER MELEAGER

Let the die be thrown; light up! I will on my way; see, courage!-- Heavy with wine, what is thy purpose?--I will revel.--I will revel?

whither wanderest, O heart?--And what is Reason to Love? light up, quick!--And where is thy old study of philosophy?--Away with the long toil of wisdom; this one thing only I know, that Love took captive even the mind of Zeus.

VIII LOVE AND WINE RUFINUS

I am armed against Love with a breastplate of Reason, neither shall he conquer me, one against one; yes, I a mortal will contend with him the immortal: but if he have Bacchus to second him, what can I do alone against the two?

IX LOVE IN THE STORM ASCLEPIADES

Snow, hail, darken, blaze, thunder, shake forth all thy glooming clouds upon the earth; for if thou slay me, then will I cease, but while thou lettest me live, though thou handle me worse than this, I will revel. For the G.o.d draws me who is thy master too, at whose persuasion, Zeus, thou didst once pierce in gold to that brazen bridal-chamber.

X A KISS WITHIN THE CUP AGATHIAS

I am no wine-bibber; but if thou wilt make me drunk, taste thou first and bring it me, and I take it. For if thou wilt touch it with thy lips, no longer is it easy to keep sober or to escape the sweet cup- bearer; for the cup ferries me over a kiss from thee, and tells me of the grace that it had.

XI LOVE'S MARTYR MELEAGER

Evermore in my ears eddies the sound of Love, and my eye silently carries sweet tears for the Desires; nor does night nor light let me rest, but already my enchanted heart bears the well-known imprint. Ah winged Loves, surely you know how to fly towards me, but have no whit of strength to fly away.

XII LOVE'S DRINK MELEAGER

The cup is glad for sweetness, and says that it touches the sweet- voiced mouth of love's darling, Zenophile. Happy! would that now, bringing up her lips to my lips, she would drink at one draught the very soul in me.

XIII LOVE THE RUNAWAY MELEAGER

I make hue and cry after wild Love; for now, even now in the morning dusk, he flew away from his bed and was gone. This boy is full of sweet tears, ever talking, swift, fearless, sly-laughing, winged on the back, and carries a quiver. But whose son he is I may not say, for Heaven denies having borne this ruffler, and so Earth and so Sea.

Everywhere and by all he is hated; but look you to it lest haply even now he is laying more springes for souls. Yet--there he is, see! about his lurking-place; I see thee well, my archer, ambushed in Zenophile's eyes.