Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology Part 3

[11] Ibid. ix. 440.

[12] Ibid. xii. 256.

[13] Anth. Pal. iv. 2.

[14] Anth. Pal. ix. 178.

[15] Ibid. x. 23.

[16] Suidas s.v. {Diogenianos}.

[17] Bacch. 318.

[18] v. 61.

[19] Anth. Pal. xi. 117.

[20] Anth. Pal. xvi. 53, 82, 114, 131, 147, 173.

[21] Agathias, Hist. i. 1: {ton epigrammaton ta artigene kai neotera oialanthanonti eti kai khuden outosi par eniois upophithurizomena}. Cf. also Suidas, s.v. {Agathias}.

[22] Anth. Pal. iv. 3.

[23] Schol. on Anth. Pal. iv. 1.

[24] Anth. Pal. vii. 429.

[25] {Konstantinos o Kephalas o makarios kai aeimnestos kai tripothetos anthrepos}.

V

When any selection of minor poetry is made, the principle of arrangement is one of the first difficulties. In dealing with the Greek epigram, the matter before us, as has been said already, consists of between five and six thousand pieces, all in the same metre, and varying in length from two to twenty-eight lines,[1] but rarely exceeding twelve. No principle of arrangement can therefore be based on the form of the poems. There are three other plans possible; a simply arbitrary order, an arrangement by authorship, or an arrangement by subject. The first, if we believe the note in the Palatine MS. already quoted, was adopted by Meleager in the alphabetical arrangement of his Garland; but beyond the uncommon variety it must give to the reader, it seems to have little to recommend it. The Anthologies of Cephalas and Planudes are both arranged by subject, but with considerable differences. The former, if we omit the unimportant sections and the Christian epigrams, consists of seven large sections in the following order:

(1) {Erotika}, amatory pieces. This heading requires no comment.

(2) {Anathematika}, dedicatory pieces, consisting of votive prayers and dedications proper.

(3) {Epitumbia}, sepulchral pieces: consisting partly of epitaphs real or imaginary, partly of epigrams on death or on dead persons in a larger scope. Thus it includes the epigram on the Lacedaemonian mother who killed her son for returning alive from an unsuccessful battle;[2]

that celebrating the magnificence of the tomb of Semiramis;[3] that questioning the story as to the leap of Empedocles into Etna;[4] and a large number which might equally well come under the next head, being eulogies on celebrated authors and artists.

(4) {Epideiktika}, epigrams written as {epideixeis}, poetical exercises or show-pieces. This section is naturally the longest and much the most miscellaneous. There is indeed hardly any epigram which could not be included in it. Remarkable objects in nature or art, striking events, actual or imaginary, of present and past times, moral sentences, and criticisms on particular persons and things or on life generally; descriptive pieces; stories told in verse; imaginary speeches of celebrated persons on different occasions, with such t.i.tles as "what Philomela would say to Procne," "what Ulysses would say when he landed in Ithaca"; inscriptions for houses, baths, gardens, temples, pictures, statues, gems, clocks, cups: such are among the contents, though not exhausting them.

(5) {Protreptika}, hortatory pieces; the "criticism of life" in the direct sense.

(6) {Sumpotika kai Skoptika}, convivial and humorous epigrams.

(7) The {Mousa paidike Stratonos} already spoken of. Along with these, as we have seen, there was in all probability an eighth section now lost, containing epigrams on works of art.

Within each of these sections, the principle of arrangement, where it exists at all, is very loose; and either the compilation was carelessly made at first, or it has been considerably disordered in transcription. Sometimes a number of epigrams by the same author succeed one another, as though copied directly from a collection where each author's work was placed separately; sometimes, on the other hand, a number on the same subject by authors of different periods come together.[5] Epigrams occasionally are put under wrong headings.

For example, a dedication by Leonidas of Alexandria is followed in the /Dedicatoria/ by another epigram of his on Oedipus;[6] an imaginary epitaph on Hesiod in the /Sepulcralia/ by one on the legendary contest between Hesiod and Homer;[7] and the lovely fragment of pastoral on Love keeping Thyrsis' sheep[8] comes oddly in among epitaphs. The epideictic section contains a number of epigrams which would be more properly placed in one or another of all the rest of the sections; and the /Musa Stratonis/ has several which happily in no way belong to it.

There is no doubt a certain charm to the very confusion of the order, which gives great variety and unexpectedness; but for practical purposes a more accurate cla.s.sification is desirable.

The Anthology of Planudes attempts, in a somewhat crude form, to supply this. Each of the six books, with the exception of the {Erotika}, which remain as is in the Palatine Anthology, is subdivided into chapters according to subject, the chapters being arranged alphabetically by headings. Thus the list of chapters in Book I.

begins, {eis agonas}, {eis ampelon}, {eis anathemata}, {eis anaperous}, and ends {eis phronesin}, {eis phrontidas}, {eis khronon}, {eis oras}.

On the other hand, Brunck, in his /a.n.a.lecta/, the arrangement of which is followed by Jacobs in the earlier of his two great works, recast the whole scheme, placing all epigrams by the same author together, with those of unknown authorship at the end. This method presents definite advantages when the matter in hand is a complete collection of the works of the epigrammatists. With these smaller, as with the more important works of literature, it is still true that a poet is his own best commentator, and that by a complete single view of all his pieces we are able to understand each one of them better. A counter-argument is the large ma.s.s of {adespota} thus left in a heap at the end. In Jacobs there are upwards of 750 of these, most of them not a.s.signable to any certain date; and they have to be arranged roughly by subject. Another is the fact that a difficulty still remains as to the arrangement of the authors. Of many of the minor epigrammatists we know absolutely nothing from external sources; and it is often impossible to determine from internal evidence the period, even within several centuries, at which an epigram was written, so little did the style and diction alter between the early Alexandrian and the late Byzantine period. Still the advantages are too great to be outweighed by these considerations.

But in a selection, an Anthology of the Anthology, the reasons for such an arrangement no longer exist, and some sort of arrangement by subject is plainly demanded. It would be possible to follow the old divisions of the Palatine Anthology with little change but for the epideictic section. This is not a natural division, and is not satisfactory in its results. It did not therefore seem worthwhile to adhere in other respects to the old cla.s.sification except where it was convenient; and by a new and somewhat more detailed division, it has been attempted to give a closer unity to each section, and to make the whole of them ill.u.s.trate progressively the aspect of the ancient world. Sections I., II., and VI. of the Palatine arrangement just given are retained, under the headings of Love, Prayers and Dedications, and the Human Comedy. It proved convenient to break up Section III., that of sepulchral epigrams, which would otherwise have been much the largest of the divisions, into two sections, one of epitaphs proper, the other dealing with death more generally. A limited selection from Section VII. has been retained under a separate heading, Beauty. Section V., with additions from many other sources, was the basis of a division dealing with the Criticism of Life; while Section IV., together with what was not already cla.s.sed, fell conveniently under five heads: Nature, and in ant.i.thesis to it, Art and Literature; Family Life; and the ethical view of things under the double aspect of Religion on the one hand, and on the other, the blind and vast forces of Fate and Change.

[1] Single lines are excluded by the definition; Anth. Pal. ix. 482 appears to be the longest piece in the Anthology which can properly be called an epigram.

[2] Anth. Pal. vii. 433.

[3] Ibid. vii. 748.

[4] Ibid. vii. 124.

[5] Cf. especially Anth. Pal. vi. 179-187; ix. 713-742.

[6] Anth. Pal. vi. 322, 323.

[7] Ibid. vii. 52, 53.

[8] Ibid. vii. 703.

VI

The literary treatment of the pa.s.sion of love is one of the matters in which the ancient stands furthest apart from the modern world. Perhaps the result of love in human lives differs but little from one age to another; but the form in which it is expressed (which is all that literature has to do with) was altered in Western Europe in the middle ages, and ever since then we have spoken a different language. And the subject is one in which the feeling is so inextricably mixed up with the expression that a new language practically means a new actual world of things. Of nothing is it so true that emotion is created by expression. The enormous volume of expression developed in modern times by a few great poets and a countless number of prose writers has reacted upon men and women; so certain is it that thought follows language, and life copies art. And so here more than elsewhere, though the rule applies to the whole sphere of human thought and action, we have to expect in Greek literature to find much latent and implicit which since then has become patent and prominent; much intricate psychology not yet evolved; much--as is the truth of everything Greek --stated so simply and directly, that we, accustomed as we are to more complex and highly organised methods of expression, cannot without some difficulty connect it with actual life, or see its permanent truth. Yet to do so is just the value of studying Greek; for the more simple the forms or ideas of life are, the better are we able to put them in relation with one another, and so to unify life. And this unity is the end which all human thought pursues.

Greek literature itself however may in this matter be historically subdivided. In its course we can fix landmarks, and trace the entrance and working of one and another fresh element. The Homeric world, the n.o.blest and the simplest ever conceived on earth; the period of the great lyric poets; that of the dramatists, philosophers and historians, which may be called the Athenian period; the hardly less extraordinary ages that followed, when Greek life and language overspread and absorbed the whole Mediterranean world, mingling with East and West alike, making a common meeting-place for the Jew and the Celt, the Arab and the Roman; these four periods, though they have a unity in the fact that they are all Greek, are yet separated in other ways by intervals as great as those which divide Virgil from Dante, or Chaucer from Milton.

In the Iliad and Odyssey little is said about love directly; and yet it is not to be forgotten that the moving force of the Trojan war was the beauty of Helen, and the central interest of the return of Odysseus is the pa.s.sionate fidelity of Penelope.[1] Yet more than this; when the poet has to speak of the matter, he never fails to rise to the occasion in a way that even now we can see to be unsurpa.s.sable.

The Achilles of the Iliad may speak scornfully of Brises, as insufficient cause to quarrel on;[2] the silver-footed G.o.ddess, set above all human longings, regards the love of men and women from her icy heights with a light pa.s.sionless contempt.[3] But in the very culminating point of the death-struggle between Achilles and Hector, it is from the whispered talk of lovers that the poet fetches the utmost touch of beauty and terror;[4] and it is in speaking to the sweetest and n.o.blest of all the women of poetry that Odysseus says the final word that has yet been said of married happiness.[5]

In this heroic period love is only spoken of incidentally and allusively. The direct poetry of pa.s.sion belongs to the next period, only known to us now by scanty fragments, "the spring-time of song,"[6] the period of the great lyric poets of the sixth and seventh centuries B.C. There human pa.s.sion and emotion had direct expression, and that, we can judge from what is left to us, the fullest and most delicate possible. Greek life then must have been more beautiful than at any other time; and the Greek language, much as it afterwards gained in depth and capacity of expressing abstract thought, has never again the same freshness, as though steeped in dew and morning sunlight. Sappho alone, that unique instance of literature where from a few hundred fragmentary lines we know certainly that we are in face of one of the great poets of the world, expressed the pa.s.sion of love in a way which makes the language of all other poets grow pallid: /ad quod c.u.m iungerent purpuras suas, cineris specie decolorari videbantur ceterae divini comparatione fulgoris/.[7]

{eraman men ego sethen, Atthi, palai pota--}[8]

such simple words that have all sadness in their lingering cadences;

{Oion to gluk.u.malon ereuthetai-- Er eti parthenias epiballomai; Ou gar en atera pais, o gambre, toiauta--}[9]

the poetry of pure pa.s.sion has never reached further than this.

But with the vast development of Greek thought and art in the fifth century B.C., there seems to have come somehow a stiffening of Greek life; the one overwhelming interest of the City absorbing individual pa.s.sion and emotion, as the interest of logic and metaphysics absorbed history and poetry. The age of Thucydides and Antipho is not one in which the emotions have a change; and at Athens especially--of other cities we can only speak from exceedingly imperfect knowledge, but just at this period Athens means Greece--the relations between men and women are even under Pericles beginning to be vulgarised. In the great dramatic poets love enters either as a subsidiary motive somewhat severely and conventionally treated, as in the Antigone of Sophocles, or, as in the Phaedra and Medea of Euripides, as part of a general study of psychology. It would be foolish to attempt to defend the address of the chorus in the Antigone to Eros,[10] if regarded as the language of pa.s.sion; and even if regarded as the language of criticism, it is undeniably frigid. Contrasted with the great chorus in the same play,[11] where Sophocles is dealing with a subject that he really cares about, it sounds almost artificial. And in Euripides, psychology occupies the whole of the interest that is not already preoccupied by logic and rhetoric; these were the arts of life, and with these serious writing dealt; with the heroism of Macaria, even with the devotion of Alcestis, personal pa.s.sion has but little to do.