Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology Part 4

With the immense expansion of the Greek world that followed the political extinction of Greece Proper, there came a relaxation of this tension. Feeling grew humaner; social and family life rea.s.sumed their real importance; and gradually there grew up a thing till then unknown in the world, and one the history of which yet remains to be written, the romantic spirit. Pastoral poetry, with its pa.s.sionate sense of beauty in nature, reacted on the sense of beauty in simple human life.

The Idyls of Theocritus are full of a new freshness of feeling: {epei k esores tas parthenos oia gelanti}[12]--this is as alien from the Athenian spirit as it approaches the feeling of a medieval romance- writer: and in the Pharmaceutriae pure pa.s.sion, but pa.s.sion softened into exquisite forms, is once more predominant.[13] It is in this age then that we naturally find the most perfect examples of the epigram of love. In the lyric period the epigram was still mainly confined to its stricter sphere, that of inscriptions for tombs and dedicated offerings: in the great Athenian age the direct treatment of love was almost in abeyance. Just on the edge of this last period, as is usual in a time of transition, there are exquisite premonitions of the new art. The lovely hexameter fragment[14] preserved in the Anthology under the name of Plato, and not unworthy of so great a parentage, antic.i.p.ates the manner and the cadences of Theocritus; and one or two of the amatory epigrams that are probably Plato's might be Meleager's, but for the severe perfection of language that died with Greek freedom. But it is in the Alexandrian period that the epigram of love flowers out; and it is at the end of that period, where the Greek spirit was touched by Oriental pa.s.sion, that it culminates in Meleager.

We possess about a hundred amatory epigrams by this poet. Inferior perhaps in clearness of outline and depth of insight to those of the Alexandrian poet Asclepiades, they are unequalled in the width of range, the profusion of imagination, the subtlety of emotion with which they sound the whole lyre of pa.s.sion. Meleager was born in a Syrian town and educated at Tyre in the last age of the Seleucid empire; and though he writes Greek with perfect mastery, it becomes in his hands almost a new language, full of dreams, at once more languid and more pa.s.sionate. It was the fashion among Alexandrian poets to experiment in language; and Callimachus had in this way brought the epigram to the most elaborate jewel-finish; but in the work of Callimachus and his contemporaries the pure Greek tradition still survives. In Meleager, the touch of Asiatic blood creates a new type, delicate, exotic, fantastic. Art is no longer restrained and severe.

The exquisite austerity of Greek poetry did not outlive the greatness of Athens; its perfect clearness of outline still survived in Theocritus; here both are gone. The atmosphere is loaded with a steam of perfumes, and with still unimpaired ease and perfection of hand there has come in a strain of the quality which of all qualities is the most remote from the Greek spirit, mysticism. Some of Meleager's epigrams are direct and simple, even to coa.r.s.eness; but in all the best and most characteristic there is this vital difference from purely Greek art, that love has become a religion; the spirit of the East has touched them. It is this that makes Meleager so curiously akin to the medieval poets. Many of his turns of thought, many even of his actual expressions, have the closest parallel in poets of the fourteenth century who had never read a line of his work nor heard of his name. As in them, the religion of love is reduced to a theology; no subtlety, no fluctuation of fancy or pa.s.sion is left unregistered, alike in their lighter and their graver moods. Sometimes the feeling is buried in ma.s.ses of conceits, sometimes it is eagerly pa.s.sionate, but even then always with an imaginative and florid pa.s.sion, never directly as Sappho or Catullus is direct. Love appears in a hundred shapes amidst a shower of fantastic t.i.tles and attributes. Out of all the epithets that Meleager coins for him, one, set in a line of hauntingly liquid and languid rhythm, "delicate-sandalled,"[15] gives the key-note to the rest. Or again, he often calls him {glukupikros}, "bittersweet";[16] at first he is like wine mingled with honey for sweetness, but as he grows and becomes more tyrannous, his honey scorches and stings; and the lover, "set on fire and drenched to swooning with his ointments," drinks from a deeper cup and mingles his wine with burning tears.[17] Love the Reveller goes masking with the lover through stormy winter nights;[18] Love the Ball-player tosses hearts for b.a.l.l.s in his hands;[19] Love the Runaway lies hidden in a lady's eyes;[20] Love the Healer soothes with a touch the wound that his own dart has made;[21] Love the Artist sets his signature beneath the soul which he has created;[22] Love the Helmsman steers the soul, like a winged boat, over the perilous seas of desire;[23] Love the Child, playing idly with his dice at sundawn, throws lightly for human lives.[24] Now he is a winged boy with childish bow and quiver, swift of laughter and speech and tears;[25] now a fierce G.o.d with flaming arrows, before whom life wastes away like wax in the fire, Love the terrible, Love the slayer of men.[26] The air all round him is heavy with the scent of flowers and ointments; violets and myrtle, narcissus and lilies, are woven into his garlands, and the rose, "lover-loving"

as Meleager repeatedly calls it in one of his curious new compound epithets,[27] is perpetually about him, and rains its petals over the banqueting-table and the myrrh-drenched doorway.[28] For a moment Meleager can be piercingly simple; and then the fantastic mood comes over him again, and emotion dissolves in a mist of metaphors. But even when he is most fantastic the unfailing beauty of his rhythms and grace of his language remind us that we are still in the presence of a real art.

The pattern set by Meleager was followed by later poets; and little more would remain to say were it not necessary to notice the brief renascence of amatory poetry in the sixth century. The poets of that period take a high place in the second rank; and one, Paulus Silentiarius, has a special interest among them as being at once the most antique in his workmanship and the most modern in his sentiment.

One of his epigrams is like an early poem of Shakespeare's;[29]

another has in a singular degree the manner and movement of a sonnet by Rossetti.[30] This group of epigrammatists brought back a phantom of freshness into the old forms; once more the epigram becomes full of pretty rhythms and fancies, but they are now more artificial; set beside work of the best period they come out clumsy and heavy.

Language is no longer vivid and natural; the colour is a little dimmed, the tone a little forced. As the painter's art had disappeared into that of the worker in mosaic, so the language of poetry was no longer a living stream, but a treasury of glittering words. Verse- writers studied it carefully and used it cleverly, but never could make up for the want of free movement of hand by any laborious minuteness of tessellation. Yet if removed from the side of their great models they are graceful enough, with a prettiness that recalls and probably in many cases is copied from the novelists of the fourth century; and sometimes it is only a touch of the diffuseness inseparable from all Byzantine writing that separates their work in quality from that of an earlier period.

After Justinian the art practically died out. The pedantic rigour of Byzantine scholarship was little favourable to the poetry of emotion, and the spoken language had now fallen so far apart from the literary idiom that only scholars were capable of writing in the old cla.s.sical forms. The popular love-poetry, if it existed, has perished and left no traces; henceforth, for the five centuries that elapsed till the birth of Provencal and Italian poetry, love lay voiceless, as though entranced and entombed.

[1] Cf. Il. iii. 156; Anth. Pal. ix. 166.

[2] Il. i. 298.

[3] Il. xxiv. 130.

[4] Il. xxii. 126-8.

[5] Od. vi. 185.

[6] {ear umnon}, Anth. Pal. vii. 12.

[7] Vopisc. Aurel. c. 29.

[8] Frag. 33 Bergk.

[9] Fragg. 93, 102, 106 Bergk.

[10] ll. 781, foll.

[11] ll. 332, foll.

[12] Theocr. i. 85.

[13] ll. 105-110 of this poem set beside Sappho, Fr. ii. ll. 9-16, Bergk, are a perfect example of the pastoral in contrast with the lyrical treatment.

[14] App. Plan. 210.

[15] Anth. Pal. xii. 158, {soi me, Theokleis, abropedilos Eros gumnon upestoresen}.

[16] Ibid. xii. 109; cf. v. 163, 172; xii. 154.

[17] Ibid. xii. 132, 164.

[18] Ibid. xii. 167.

[19] Ibid. v. 214.

[20] Ibid. v. 177.

[21] Ibid. v. 225.

[22] Ibid. v. 155.

[23] Ibid. xii. 157.

[24] Anth. Pal. xii. 47.

[25] Ibid. v. 177.

[26] Ibid. v. 176, 180; xii. 72.

[27] Ibid. v. 136, 147.

[28] Ibid. v. 147, 198.

[29] Ibid. v. 241; cf. Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim, xiv., xv.

[30] App. Plan. 278.

VII

Closely connected with the pa.s.sion of love as conceived by Greek writers is a subject which continually meets us in Greek literature, and which fills so large a part of the Anthology that it can hardly be pa.s.sed over without notice. The few epigrams selected from the Anthology of Strato and included in this collection under the heading of Beauty are not of course a representative selection. Of the great ma.s.s of those epigrams no selection is possible or desirable. They belong to that side of Greek life which is akin to the Oriental world, and remote and even revolting to the western mind. And on this subject the common moral sense of civilised mankind has p.r.o.nounced a judgment which requires no justification as it allows of no appeal.

But indeed the whole conception of Eros the boy, familiar as it sounds to us from the long continued convention of literature, is, if we think of its origin or meaning, quite alien from our own habit of life and thought. Even in the middle ages it cohered but ill with the literary view of the relations between men and women in poetry and romance; hardly, except where it is raised into a higher sphere by the a.s.sociations of religion, as in the friezes of Donatello, is it quite natural, and now, apart from what remains of these same a.s.sociations, the natural basis of the conception is wholly obsolete. Since the fashion of squires and pages, inherited from the feudal system, ceased with the decay of the Renaissance, there has been nothing in modern life which even remotely suggests it. We still--such is the strength of tradition in art--speak of Love under the old types, and represent him under the image of a winged boy; but the whole condition of society in which this type grew up has disappeared and left the symbolism all but meaningless to the ordinary mind. In Greece it was otherwise. Side by side with the unchanging pa.s.sions and affections of all mankind there was then a feeling, half conventional, and yet none the less of vital importance to thought and conduct, which elevated the mere physical charm of human youth into an object of almost divine worship. Beauty was the special gift of the G.o.ds, perhaps their choicest one; and not only so, but it was a pa.s.sport to their favour.

Common life in the open air, and above all the importance of the gymnasia, developed great perfection of bodily form and kept it constantly before all men's eyes. Art lavished all it knew on the reproduction of the forms of youthful beauty. Apart from the real feeling, the worship of this beauty became an overpowering fashion. To all this there must be added a fact of no less importance in historical Greece, the seclusion of women. Not that this ever existed in the Oriental sense; but, with much freedom and simplicity of relations inside the family, the share which women had in the public and external life of the city, at a time when the city meant so much, was comparatively slight. The greater freedom of women in Homer makes the world of the Iliad and Odyssey really more modern, more akin to our own, than that of the later poets. The girl in Theocritus, "with spring in her eyes,"[1] comes upon us as we read the Idyls almost like a modernism. It is in the fair shepherd boy, Daphnis or Thyrsis, that Greek pastoral finds its most obvious, one might almost say its most natural inspiration.

Much of what is most perplexing in the difference in this respect between Greek and western art has light thrown on it, if we think of the importance which angels have in medieval painting. Their invention, if one may call it so, was one of the very highest moment in art. Those lovely creations, so precisely drawn up to a certain point, so elusive beyond it, raised the feeling for pure beauty into a wholly ideal plane. The deepest longings of men were satisfied by the contemplation of a paradise in which we should be even as they. In that mystical portraiture of the invisible world an answer--perhaps the only answer--was found to the demand for an ideal of beauty. That remarkable saying preserved by S. Clement, of a kingdom in which "the two shall be one, and the male with the female neither male nor female,"[2] might form the text for a chapter of no small importance in human history. The Greek lucidity, which made all mysticism impossible in their art as it was alien from their life, did not do away with this imperious demand; and their cult of beauty was the issue of their attempt, imperfect indeed at best and at worst disastrous, to reunite the fragments of the human ideal.[3]

In much of this poetry too we are in the conventional world of pastoral; and pastoral, it must be repeated, does not concern itself with real life. The amount of lat.i.tude in literary expression varies no doubt with the prevalent popular morality of the period. But it would lead to infinite confusion to think of the poetry as a translation of conduct. A truer picture of Greek life is happily given us in those epigrams which deal with the material that history pa.s.ses over and ideal poetry, at least in Greek literature, barely touches upon, the life of simple human relations from day to day within the circle of the family.

[1] {ear oroosa Nukheia}, Theocr. xiii. 42.

[2] Clem. Rom. II. 12: {eperotetheis autos o Kurios upo tinos pote exei autou e basileia, eipen, otan estai ta duo en kai to exo os to eso kai to a.r.s.en meta tes theleias oute a.r.s.en oute thelu}. It is also quoted in almost the same words by Clem. Alex., Strom.

xiii. 92, as from "the Gospel according to the Egyptians."

[3] Cf. Plato, Sympos. 191, 192.

VIII

Scattered over the sections of the Anthology are a number of epigrams touching on this life, which are the more valuable to us, because it is just this side of the ancient world of which the ma.s.s of Greek literature affords a very imperfect view. In Homer indeed this is not the case; but in the Athenian period the dramatists and historians give little information, if we accept the highly idealised burlesque of the Aristophanic Comedy. Of the New Comedy too little is preserved to be of much use, and even in it the whole atmosphere was very conventional. The Greek novel did not come into existence till too late; and, when it came, it took the form of romance, concerning itself more with the elaboration of sentiment and the excitement of adventure than with the portraiture of real manners and actual surroundings. For any detailed picture of common life, like that which would be given of our own day to future periods by the domestic novel, we look to ancient literature in vain. Thus, when we are admitted by a fortunate chance into the intimacy of private life, as we are by some of the works of Xenophon and Plutarch or by the letters of the younger Pliny, the charm of the picture is all the greater: and so it is with the epigrams that record birthdays and bridals, the toys of children, the concord of quiet homes. We see the house of the good man,[1] an abiding rest from the labours of a busy life, bountiful to all, masters and servants, who dwell under its shelter, and extending a large hospitality to the friend and the stranger. One generation after another grows up in it under all good and gracious influences; a special providence, under the symbolic forms of Cypris Urania or Artemis the Giver of Light, holds the house in keeping, and each new year brings increased blessing from the G.o.ds of the household in recompense of piety and duty.[2] Many dedications bring vividly before us the humbler life of the country cottager, no man's servant or master, happy in the daily labour over his little plot of land, his corn-field and vineyard and coppice; of the fowler with his boys in the woods, the forester and the beekeeper, and the fisherman in his thatched hut on the beach.[3] And in these contrasted pictures the "wealth that makes men kind" seems not to jar with the "poverty that lives with freedom."[4] Modern poetry dwells with more elaboration, but not with the truer or more delicate feeling than those ancient epigrams, on the pretty ways of children, the freshness of school- days, the infinite beauty of the girl as she pa.s.ses into the woman; or even such slight things as the school-prize for the best copy-book, and the child's doll in the well.[5] A shadow pa.s.ses over the picture in the complaint of a girl sitting indoors, full of dim thoughts, while the boys go out to their games and enjoy unhindered the colour and movement of the streets.[6] But this is the melancholy of youth, the shadow of the brightness that pa.s.ses before the maiden's eyes as she sits, sunk in day-dreams, over her loom;[7] it pa.s.ses away again in the portrait of the girl growing up with the sweet eyes of her mother, the budding rose that will soon unfold its heart of flame;[8]