Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology Part 6

[22] Ibid. ix. 7, vi. 70.

[23] Ibid. vi. 30, 25, 21, 178, 127.

[24] Ibid. vi. 337; cf. Theocr. Idyl xxii.

[25] Frag. incert. 257, {tout esti to zen oukh eauto zen monon}.

[26] Anth. Pal. x. 10, 24.

[27] Ibid. vi. 98, {ek mikron oligista}.

[28] Ibid. vi. 98, 102; 103, 92; 174, 247.

[29] Ibid. vi. 3, 336.

[30] Ibid. vi. 177.

[31] Ibid. vi. 55; cf. vi. 119, xii. 131.

[32] Anth. Pal. vi. 31, 98.

[33] App. Plan. 17; cf. Lucret. v. 1387.

[34] Anth. Pal. vi. 11-16, and 179-187. The poets are Leonidas of Tarentum, Alcaeus of Messene, Antipater of Sidon, Alexander, Julius Diocles, Satyrus, Archias, Zosimus and Julia.n.u.s Aegyptius.

[35] Anth. Pal. vi. 111, App. Plan. 188: compare Song iii. in Milton's /Arcades/.

[36] Anth. Pal. x. 8; vi. 253, 268; vi. 79.

X

Though the section of the Palatine Anthology dealing with works of art, if it ever existed, is now completely lost, we have still left a considerable number of epigrams which come under this head. Many are preserved in the Planudean Anthology. Many more, on account of the cross-division of subjects that cannot be avoided in arranging any collection of poetry, are found in other sections of the Palatine Anthology. It was a favourite device, for example, to cast a criticism or eulogy of an author or artist into the form of an imaginary epitaph; and this was often actually inscribed on a monument, or beneath a bust, in the galleries or gardens of a wealthy /virtuoso/.

Thus the sepulchral epigrams include inscriptions of this sort of many of the most distinguished names of Greek literature. They are mainly on poets and philosophers; Homer and Hesiod, the great tragedians and comedians, the long roll of the lyric poets, most frequently among them Sappho, Alcman, Erinna, Archilochus, Pindar, and the whole line of philosophers from Thales and Anaxagoras down to the latest teachers in the schools of Athens. Often in those epigrams some vivid epithet or fine touch of criticism gives a real value to them even now; the "frowning towers" of the Aeschylean tragedy, the trumpet-note of Pindar, the wealth of lovely flower and leaf, crisp Archanian ivy, rose and vine, that cl.u.s.ters round the tomb of Sophocles.[1] Those on the philosophers are, as one would expect, generally of inferior quality.

Many again are to be found among the miscellaneous section of epideictic epigrams. Instances which deal with literature directly are the n.o.ble lines of Alpheus on Homer, the interesting epigram on the authorship of the /Phaedo/, the lovely couplet on the bucolic poets.[2] Some are inscriptions for libraries or collections;[3]

others are on particular works of art. Among these last, epigrams on statues or pictures dealing with the power of music are specially notable; the conjunction, in this way, of the three arts seems to have given peculiar pleasure to the refined and eclectic culture of the Graeco-Roman period. The contest of Apollo and Marsyas, the piping of Pan to Echo, and the celebrated subject of the Faun listening for the sound of his own flute,[4] are among the most favourite and the most gracefully treated of this cla.s.s. Even more beautiful, however, than these, and worthy to take rank with the finest "sonnets on pictures"

of modern poets, is the epigram ascribed to Theocritus, and almost certainly written for a picture,[5] which seems to place the whole world of ancient pastoral before our eyes. The grouping of the figures is like that in the famous Venetian Pastoral of Giorgione; in both alike are the shadowed gra.s.s, the slim pipes, the hand trailing upon the viol-string. But the execution has the matchless simplicity, the incredible purity of outline, that distinguishes Greek work from that of all other races.

A different view of art and literature, and one which adds considerably to our knowledge of the ancient feeling about them, is given by another cla.s.s of pieces, the irrisory epigrams of the Anthology. Then, as now, people were amused by bad and bored by successful artists, and delighted to laugh at both; then, as now, the life of the scholar or the artist had its meaner side, and lent itself easily to ridicule from without, to jealousy and discontent from within. The air rang with jeers at the portrait-painter who never got a likeness, the too facile composer whose body was to be burned on a pile of five-and-twenty chests all filled with his own scores, the bad grammar of the grammarian, the supersubtle logic and the c.u.mbrous technical language of the metaphysician, the disastrous fertility of the authors of machine-made epics.[6] The poor scholar had become proverbial; living in a garret where the very mice were starved, teaching the children of the middle cla.s.ses for an uncertain pittance, glad to buy a dinner with a dedication, and gradually petrifying in the monotony of a thousand repet.i.tions of stock pa.s.sages and lectures to empty benches.[7] Land and sea swarmed with penniless grammarians.[8] The epigrams of Palladas of Alexandria bring before us vividly the miseries of a schoolmaster. Those of Callimachus shew with as painful clearness how the hatred of what was bad in literature might end in embittering the whole nature.[9] Many epigrams are extant which indicate that much of a scholar's life, even when he had not to earn bitter bread on the stairs of patrons, was wasted in laborious pedantry or in personal jealousies and recriminations.[10]

Of epigrams on individual works of art it is not necessary to say much. Their numbers must have been enormous. The painted halls and colonnades, common in all Greek towns, had their stories told in verse below; there was hardly a statue or picture of any note that was not the subject of a short poem. A collected series of works of art had its corresponding series of epigrams. The Anthology includes, among other lists, a description of nineteen subjects carved in relief on the pedestals of the columns in a temple at Cyzicus, and another of seventy-three bronze statues which stood in the great hall of a gymnasium at Constantinople.[11] Any celebrated work like the Niobe of Praxiteles, or the bronze heifer of Myron, was the practising-ground for every tried or untried poet, seeking new praise for some clever conceit or neater turn of language than had yet been invented.

Especially was this so with the trifling art of the decadence and its perpetual round of childish Loves: Love ploughing, Love holding a fish and a flower as symbols of his sovereignty over sea and land, Love asleep on a pepper-castor, Love blowing a torch, Love grasping or breaking the thunderbolt, Love with a helmet, a shield, a quiver, a trident, a club, a drum.[12] Enough of this cla.s.s of epigrams are extant to be perfectly wearisome, were it not that, like the engraved gems from which their subjects are princ.i.p.ally taken, they are all, however trite in subject or commonplace in workmanship, wrought in the same beautiful material, in that language which is to all other languages as a gem to an ordinary pebble.

From these sources we are able to collect a body of epigrams which in a way cover the field of ancient art and literature. Sometimes they preserve fragments of direct criticism, verbal or real. We have epigrams on fashions in prose style, on conventional graces of rhetoric, on the final disappearance of ancient music in the sixth century.[13] Of art-criticism in the modern sense there is but little.

The striking epigram of Parrhasius, on the perfection attainable in painting,[14] is almost a solitary instance. Pictures and statues are generally praised for their actual or imagined realism. Silly stories like those of the birds pecking at the grapes of Zeuxis, or the calf who went up to suck the bronze cow of Myron, represent the general level of the critical faculty. Even Aristotle, it must be remembered, who represents the most finished Greek criticism, places the pleasure given by works of art in the recognition by the spectator of things which he has already seen. "The reason why people enjoy seeing pictures is that the spectators learn and infer what each object is; /this/, they say, /is so and so/; while if one has not seen the thing before, the pleasure is produced not by the imitation,"--or by the art, for he uses the two terms convertibly--"but by the execution, the colour, or some such cause."[15] And Plato (though on this subject one can never be quite sure that Plato is serious) talks of the graphic art as three times removed from realities, being only employed to make copies of semblances of the external objects which are themselves the copies or shadows of the ideal truth of things.[16] So far does Greek thought seem to be from the conception of an ideal art which is nearer truth than nature is, which nature itself indeed tries with perpetual striving, and ever incomplete success, to copy, which, as Aristotle does in one often quoted pa.s.sage admit with regard to poetry, has a higher truth and a deeper seriousness than that of actual things.

But this must not be pressed too far. The critical faculty, even where fully present, may be overpowered by the rhetorical impulse; and of all forms of poetry the epigram has the greatest right to be fanciful.

"This is the Satyr of Diodorus; if you touch it, it will awake; the silver is asleep,"[17]--obviously this play of fancy has nothing to do with serious criticism. And of a really serious feeling about art there is sufficient evidence, as in the pathos of the sculptured Ariadne, happy in sleeping and being stone, and even more strongly in the lines on the picture of the Faun, which have the very tone and spirit of the /Ode on a Grecian Urn/.[18]

Two epigrams above all deserve special notice; one almost universally known, that written by Callimachus on his dead friend, the poet Herac.l.i.tus of Halicarna.s.sus; the other, no less n.o.ble, 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 a.n.a.lyse 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.