Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology Part 7

The "constant epithet" of early poetry is a survival of this stage of thought; nature is a series of things, every one of which has its special note; "green gra.s.s," "wet water." Here the feeling for Nature likewise is simple and sensuous; the pleasure of shade and cool water in summer, of soft gra.s.s to lie on, of the flowers and warm sunshine of spring.

Then out of this infancy of feeling rises the curiosity of childhood; no longer content with noting and recording the obvious aspects of Nature, man observes and inquires and pays attention. The more attention is paid, the more is seen: and an immense growth follows in the language of poetry. To express the feeling for nature description becomes necessary, and this again involves, in order that the work may not be endless, selection and composition.

Again, upon this comes the sentimental feeling for Nature, a sort of sympathy created by interest and imagination. Among early races this, like other feelings, expresses itself in the forms of mythology, and half personifies the outer world, giving the tree her Dryad and the fountain her Nymph, making Pan and Echo meet in the forest glade. When the mythological instinct has ceased to be active, it results in sentimental description, sometimes realistic in detail, sometimes largely or even wholly conventional. It has always in it something of a reaction, real or affected, from crowds and the life of cities, an attempt to regain simplicity by isolation from the complex fabric of society.

Once more, the feeling for Nature may go deeper than the senses and the imagination, and become moral. The outer world is then no more a spectacle only, but the symbol of a meaning, the embodiment of a soul.

Earth, the mother and fostress, receives our sympathy and gives us her own. The human spirit turns away from itself to seek sustenance from the mountains and the stars. The whole outer universe becomes the visible and sensible language of an ideal essence; and dawn or sunset, winter or summer, is of the nature of a sacrament.

There is over and above all these another sense in which we may speak of the feeling for Nature; and in regard to poetry it is perhaps the most important of all. But it no longer follows, like the rest, a sort of law of development in human nature generally; it is confined to art, and among the arts is eminent in poetry beyond the rest. This is the romantic or magical note. It cannot be a.n.a.lysed, perhaps it cannot be defined; the insufficiency of all attempted definitions of poetry is in great part due to the impossibility of their including this final quality, which, like some volatile essence, escapes the moment the phial is touched. In the poetry of all ages, even in the periods where it has been most intellectual and least imaginative, come sudden lines like the /Cette obscure clarte qui tombe des etoiles/ of Corneille, like the /Placed far amid the melancholy main/ of Thomson, where the feeling for Nature cannot be called moral, and yet stirs us like the deepest moral criticism upon life, rising as far beyond the mere idealism of sentiment as it does beyond the utmost refinement of realistic art.

In all these different forms the feeling for Nature may be ill.u.s.trated from Greek poetry; but the broad fact remains that Nature on the whole has a smaller part than it has with modern poets. Descriptive pieces are executed in a slighter manner, and on the whole with a more conventional treatment. Landscapes, for example, are always a background, never (or hardly ever) the picture itself. The influence of mythology on art was so overwhelming that, down to the last, it determined the treatment of many subjects where we should now go directly to the things themselves. Especially is this so with what has been described as the moral feeling for nature. Among "the unenlightened swains of Pagan Greece," as Wordsworth says, the deep effect of natural beauty on the mind was expressed under the forms of a concrete symbolism, a language to which literature had grown so accustomed that they had neither the power nor the wish to break free from it. The appeal indeed from man to Nature, and especially the appeal to Nature as knowing more about man's destiny than he knows himself, was unknown to the Greek poets. But this feeling is sentimental, not moral; and with them too "something far more deeply interfused" stirred the deepest sources of emotion. The music of Pan, at which the rustle of the oakwood ceases and the waterfall from the cliff is silent and the faint bleating of the sheep dies away,[1] is the expression in an ancient language of the spirit of Nature, fixed and embodied by the enchanting touch of art.

Of the epigrams which deal primarily with the sensuous feeling for Nature, the most common are those on the delight of summer, rustling breezes and cold springs and rest under the shadow of trees. In the ardours of midday the traveller is guided from the road over a gra.s.sy brow to an ice-cold spring that gushes out of the rock under a pine; or lying idly on the soft meadow in the cool shade of the plane, is lulled by the whispering west wind through the branches, the monotone of the cicalas, the faint sound of a far-off shepherd's pipe floating down the hills; or looking up into the heart of the oak, sees the dim green roof, layer upon layer, mount and spread and shut out the sky.[2] Or the citizen, leaving the glare of town, spends a country holiday on strewn willow-boughs with wine and music,[3] as in that most perfect example of the poetry of a summer day, the /Thalysia/ of Theocritus. Down to a late Byzantine period this form of poetry, the nearest approach to pure description of nature in the old world, remained alive; as in the picture drawn by Arabius of the view from a villa on the sh.o.r.e of the Propontis, with its gardens set between wood and sea, where the warbling of birds mingled with the distant songs of the ferrymen.[4] Other landscape poems, as they may be called, remarkable for their clear and vivid portraiture, are that of Mnasalcas,[5] the low sh.o.r.e with its bright surf, and the temple with its poplars round which the sea-fowl hover and cry, and that of Anyte,[6] the windy orchard-close near the grey colourless coast, with the well and the Hermes standing over it at the crossways. But such epigrams always stop short of the description of natural objects for their own sake, for the mere delight in observing and speaking about them. Perhaps the nearest approach that Greek poetry makes to this is in a remarkable fragment of Sophocles,[7] describing the shiver that runs through the leaves of a poplar when all the other trees stand silent and motionless.

The descriptions of Nature too are, as a rule, not only slightly sketched, but kept subordinate to a human relation. The brilliance and loveliness of spring is the background for the picture of the sailor again putting to sea, or the husbandman setting his plough at work in the furrow; the summer woods are a resting-place for the hot and thirsty traveller; the golden leaves of autumn thinning in the frosty night, making haste to be gone before the storms of rough November, are a frame for the boy beneath them.[8] The life of earth is rarely thought of as distinct from the life of man. It is so in a few late epigrams. The complaint of the cicala, torn away by shepherds from its harmless green life of song and dew among the leaves, and the poem bidding the blackbird leave the dangerous oak, where, with its breast against a spray, it pours out its clear music,[9] are probably of Roman date; another of uncertain period but of great beauty, an epitaph on an old bee-keeper who lived alone on the hills with the high woods and pastures for his only neighbours, contrasts with a strangely modern feeling the perpetuity of nature and the return of the works of spring with the brief life of man that ends once for all on a cold winter night.[10]

Between the simply sensuous and the deep moral feeling for nature lies the broad field of pastoral. This is not the place to enter into the discussion of pastoral poetry; but it must be noted in pa.s.sing that it does not imply of necessity any deep love, and still less any close observation, of nature. It looks on nature, as it looks on human life, through a medium of art and sentiment; and its treatment of nature depends less on the actual world around it than on the prevalent art of the time. Greek art concentrated its efforts on the representation of the human figure, and even there preferred the abstract form and the rigid limitations of sculpture; and the poetry that saw, as it were, through the eyes of art sought above all things simplicity of composition and clearness of outline. The scanty vocabulary of colour in Greek poetry, so often noticed, is a special and patent example of this difference in the spirit with which Nature was regarded. As the poetry of Chaucer corresponds, in its wealth and intimacy of decoration, to the illuminations and tapestries of the middle ages, so the epigrams given under this section constantly recall the sculptured reliefs and the engraved gems of Greek art.

But any such general rules must be taken with their exceptions. As there is a risk of reading modern sentiment into ancient work, and even of fixing on the startling modernisms that occur in Greek poetry,[11] and dwelling on them till they a.s.sume an exaggerated importance, so there is a risk perhaps as great of slurring over the inmost quality, the poetry of the poetry, where it has that touch of romance or magic that sets it beyond all our generalisations. The magical charm is just what cannot be brought under any rules; it is the result less of art than of instinct, and is almost independent of time and place. The lament of the swallow in an Alexandrian poet[12]

touches the same note of beauty and longing that Keats drew from the song of the nightingale; the couplet of Satyrus, where echo repeats the lonely cry of the birds,[13] is, however different in tone, as purely romantic as the opening lines of /Christabel/.

[1] Anth. Pal. ix. 823.

[2] App. Plan. 230, 227; Anth. Pal. ix. 71.

[3] vi. 28 in this selection.

[4] Anth. Pal. ix. 667.

[5] Ibid. ix. 333.

[6] Ibid. ix. 314.

[7] Aegeus, fr. 24; cf. the celebrated simile in /Hyperion/, beginning, /As when upon a tranced summer night/.

[8] Anth. Pal. xii. 138.

[9] Ibid. ix. 373, 87.

[10] Ibid. vii. 717.

[11] A curious instance is in an epigram by Mnasalcas (Anth. Pal. vii.

194), where he speaks of the evening hymn ({panesperon umnon}) of the gra.s.shopper. This, it must be remembered, was written in the third century B.C.

[12] Pamphilus in Anth. Pal. ix. 57.

[13] App. Plan. 153.

XII

Though fate and death make a dark background against which the brilliant colouring of Greek life glitters out with heightened magnificence, the comedy of men and manners occupies an important part of their literature, and Aristophanes and Menander are as intimately Greek as Sophocles. It is needless to speak of what we gain in our knowledge of Greece from the preserved comedies of Aristophanes; and if we follow the best ancient criticism, we must conclude that in Menander we have lost a treasury of Greek life that cannot be replaced. Quintilian, speaking at a distance from any national or contemporary prejudice, uses terms of him such as we should not think unworthy of Shakespeare.[1] These Attic comedians were the field out of which epigrammatists, from that time down to the final decay of literature, drew some of their graver and very many of their lighter epigrams. Of the convivial epigrams in the Anthology a number are imitated from extant fragments of the New Comedy; one at least[2]

transfers a line of Menander's unaltered; and short fragments of both Menander and Diphilus are included in the Anthology as though not materially differing from epigrams themselves.[3]

Part of this section might be cla.s.sed with the criticism of life from the Epicurean point of view. Some of the convivial epigrams are purely unreflective; they speak only of the pleasure of the moment, the frank joy in songs and wine and roses, at a vintage-revel, or in the chartered licence of a public festival, or simply without any excuse but the fire in the blood, and without any conclusion but the emptied jar.[4] Some bring in a flash of more vivid colour where Eros mingles with Bromius, and, on a bright spring day, Rose-flower crosses the path, carrying her fresh-blown roses.[5] Others, through their light surface, show a deeper feeling, a claim half jestingly but half seriously made for dances and lyres and garlands as things deeply ordained in the system of nature, a call on the disconsolate lover to be up and drink, and rear his drooping head, and not lie down in the dust while he is yet alive.[6] Some in complete seriousness put the argument for happiness with the full force of logic and sarcasm. "All the ways of life are pleasant," cries Julia.n.u.s in reply to the weariness expressed by an earlier poet;[7] "in country or town, alone or among fellow-men, dowered with the graciousness of wife and children, or living on in the free and careless life of youth; all is well, live!" And the answer to melancholy has never been put in a concrete form with finer and more penetrating wit than in the couplet of Lucian on the man who must needs be sober when all were drinking, and so appeared in respect of his company to be the one drunk man there.[8]

It is here that the epigrams of comedy reach their high-water mark; in contrast to them is another cla.s.s in which the lightness is a little forced and the humour touches cynicism. In these the natural brutality of the Roman mind makes the Latin epigram heavier and keener-pointed; the greater number indeed of the Greek epigrams of this complexion are of the Roman period; and many of them appear to be directly imitated from Martial and Juvenal, though possibly in some cases it is the Latin poet who is the copyist.

Though they are not actually kept separate--nor indeed would a complete separation be possible--the heading of this section of the Palatine Anthology distinguishes the {sumpotika}, the epigrams of youth and pleasure, from the {skoptika}, the witty or humorous verses which have accidentally in modern English come almost to absorb the full signification of the word epigram. The latter come princ.i.p.ally under two heads: one, where the point of the epigram depends on an unexpected verbal turn, the other, where the humour lies in some gross exaggeration of statement. Or these may be combined; in some of the best there is an acc.u.mulation of wit, a second and a third point coming suddenly on the top of the first.[9]

Perhaps the saying, so often repeated, that ancient humour was simpler than modern, rests on a more sufficient basis than most similar generalisations; and indeed there is no single criterion of the difference between one age and another more easy and certain of application, where the materials for applying it exist, than to compare the things that seem amusing to them. A certain foundation of humour seems to be the common inheritance of mankind, but on it different periods build differently. The structure of a Greek joke is generally very simple; more obvious and less highly elliptical in thought than the modern type, but, on the other hand, considerably more subtle than the wit of the middle ages. There was a store of traditional jests on the learned professions, law, astrology, medicine --the last especially; and the schools of rhetoric and philosophy were, from their first beginning, the subject of much pleasantry. Any popular reputation, in painting, music, literature, gave material for facetious attack; and so did any bodily defect, even those, it must be added, which we think of now as exciting pity or as to be pa.s.sed over in silence.[10] Many of these jokes, which even then may have been of immemorial antiquity, are still current. The serpent that bit a Cappadocian and died of it, the fashionable lady whose hair is all her own, and paid for,[11] are instances of this simple form of humour that has no beginning nor end. Some Greek jests have an Irish inconsequence, some the grave and logical monstrosity of American humour.

Nave, crude, often vulgar; such is the general impression produced by the ma.s.s of these lighter epigrams. The bulk of them are of late date; and the culture of the ancient world was running low when its /vers de societe/ reached no higher level than this. Of course they can only be called poetry by a large stretch of courtesy. In a few instances the work is raised to the level of art by a curious Dutch fidelity and minute detail. In one given in this selection,[12] a great poet has bent to this light and trivial style. The high note of Simonides is as clear and certain here as in his lines on the Spartans at Thermopylae or in the cry of grief over the young man dead in the snow-clogged surf of the Saronic sea. With such exceptions, the only touch of poetry is where a graver note underlies their light insolence. "Drink with me," runs the Greek song, "be young with me; love with me, wear garlands with me; be mad with me in my madness; I will be serious with you in your seriousness."[13] And so behind the flutes and flowers change comes and the shadow of fate stands waiting, and through the tinkling of the rose-hung river is heard in undertone the grave murmur of the sea.

[1] /Omnem vitae imaginem expressit . . . omnibus rebus, personis, adfectibus accomodatus/: see the whole pa.s.sage, Inst. Rhet. x. i.

69-72.

[2] Anth. Pal. xi. 286.

[3] Ibid. xi. 438, 439.

[4] Ibid. v. 134, 135; xi. 1.

[5] Ibid. v. 81; xi. 64.

[6] Anth. Pal. ix. 270; xii. 50.

[7] Ibid. ix. 446.

[8] Ibid. xi. 429.

[9] Cf. ibid. xi. 85, 143.

[10] Cf. Anth. Pal. xi. 342, 404.

[11] Ibid. xi. 68, 237.

[12] Infra, x. 5.

[13] Athenaeus, 695, d.

XIII

For over all Greek life there lay a shadow. Man, a weak and pitiable creature, lay exposed to the shafts of a grim and ironic power that went its own way careless of him, or only interfered to avenge its own slighted majesty. "G.o.d is always jealous and troublesome"; such is the reflection which Herodotus, the pious historian of a pious age, puts in the mouth of the wisest of the Greeks.[1] Punishment will sooner or later follow sin; that is certain; but it is by no means so certain that the innocent will not be involved with the guilty, or that offence will not be taken where none was meant. The law of /laesa majestas/ was executed by the ruling powers of the universe with unrelenting and undiscriminating severity. Fate seemed to take a sardonic pleasure in confounding expectation, making destruction spring out of apparent safety, and filling life with dramatic and memorable reversals of fortune.

And besides the bolts launched by fate, life was as surely if more slowly weighed down by the silent and ceaseless tide of change against which nothing stood fixed or permanent, and which swept the finest and most beautiful things away the soonest. The garland that blooms at night withers by morning; and the strength of man and the beauty of women are no longer-lived than the frail anemone, the lily and violet that flower and fall.[2] Sweetness is changed to bitterness; where the rose has spread her cup, one goes by and the brief beauty pa.s.ses; returning, the seeker finds no rose, but a thorn. Swifter than the flight of a bird through the air the light-footed Hours pa.s.s by, leaving nothing but scattered petals and the remembrance of youth and spring.[3] The exhortation to use the brief s.p.a.ce of life, to realise, and, so far as that may be, to perpetuate in action the whole of the overwhelming possibilities crowded into a minute's s.p.a.ce[4] comes with a pa.s.sion like that of Shakespeare's sonnets. "On this short day of frost and sun to sleep before evening" is the one intolerable misuse of life.[5] Sometimes the feeling is expressed with the vivid pa.s.sion of a lyric:--"To what profit? for thou wilt not find a lover among the dead, O girl";[6] sometimes with the curiously impersonal and incomparably direct touch that is peculiar to Greek, as in the verses by Antipater of Sidon,[7] that by some delicate magic crowd into a few words the fugitive splendour of the waning year, the warm lingering days and sharp nights of autumn, and the brooding pause before the rigours of winter, and make the whole masque of the seasons a pageant and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of loveliness; and the bitter laugh over the empty casket of Pandora[8] comes from a heart wrung with the sorrow that beauty is less strong than time. Nor is the burden of these poems only that pleasant things decay; rather that in nothing good or bad, rich or mean, is there permanence or cert.i.tude, but everywhere and without selection Time feeds oblivion with decay of things. All things flow and nothing abides; shape and name, nature and fortune yield to the dissolving touch of time.[9]