Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology | Page 5

would seem rather to mean the latter. Even so the statement is an exaggeration; many of the best epigrams are in six and eight lines. But it is true that the epigram may "have its nature", in the phrase of Aristotle,[6] in a single couplet; and we shall generally find that in those of eight lines, as always without exception in those of more than eight, there is either some repetition of idea not necessary to the full expression of the thought, or some redundance of epithet or detail too florid for the best taste, or, as in most of the Byzantine epigrams, a natural verbosity which affects the style throughout and weakens the force and directness of the epigram.
The notorious difficulty of giving any satisfactory definition of poetry is almost equalled by the difficulty of defining with precision any one of its kinds; and the epigram in Greek, while it always remained conditioned by being in its essence and origin an?inscriptional poem, took in the later periods so wide a range of subject and treatment that it can perhaps only be limited by certain abstract conventions of length and metre. Sometimes it becomes in all but metrical form a lyric; sometimes it hardly rises beyond the versified statement of a fact or an idea; sometimes it is barely distinguishable from a snatch of pastoral. The shorter pieces of the elegiac poets might very often well be classed as epigrams but for the uncertainty, due to the form in which their text has come down to us, whether they are not in all cases, as they undoubtedly are in some, portions of longer poems. Many couplets and quatrains of Theognis fall under this head; and an excellent instance on a larger scale is the fragment of fourteen lines by Simonides of Amorgos,[7] which is the exact type on which many of the later epigrams of life are moulded. In such cases /respice auctoris animum/ is a safe rule; what was not written as an epigram is not an epigram. Yet it has seemed worth while to illustrate this rule by its exceptions; and there will be found in this collection fragments of Mimnermus and Theognis[8] which in everything but the actual circumstance of their origin satisfy any requirement which can be made. In the Palatine Anthology itself, indeed, there are a few instances[9] where this very thing is done. As a rule, however, these short passages belong to the class of {gromai} or moral sentences, which, even when expressed in elegiac verse, is sufficiently distinct from the true epigram. One instance will suffice. In the Anthology there occurs this couplet:[10]
{Pan to peritton axaipon epei logos esti palaios?os xai tou melitos to pleon esti khole}
This is a sentence merely; an abstract moral idea, with an?illustration attached to it. Compare with it another couplet[11] in the Anthology:
{Aion panta pserei dolikhos khronos oioen ameibein?ounoma xai morpsen xai psuain ede tukhen}
Here too there is a moral idea; but in the expression, abstract as it is, there is just that high note, that imaginative touch, which gives it at once the gravity of an inscription and the quality of a poem.
Again, many of the so-called epideictic epigrams are little more than stories told shortly in elegiac verse, much like the stories in Ovid's Fasti. Here the inscriptional quality is the surest test. It is this quality, perhaps in many instances due to the verses having been actually written for paintings or sculptures, that just makes an epigram of the sea-story told by Antipater of Thessalonica, and of the legend of Eunomus the harp-player[12]; while other stories, such as those told of Pittacus, of Euctemon, of Serapis and the murderer,[13] both tend to exceed the reasonable limit of length, and have in no degree either the lapidary precision of the half lyrical passion which would be necessary to make them more than tales in verse. Once more, the fragments of idyllic poetry which by chance have come down to us incorporated in the Anthology,[14] beautiful as they are, are in no sense epigrams any more than the lyrics ascribed to Anacreon which form an appendix to the Palatine collection, or the quotations from the dramatists, Euripides, Menander, or Diphilus,[15] which have also at one time or another become incorporated with it.
In brief then, the epigram in its first intention may be described as a very short poem summing up as though in a memorial inscription what it is desired to make permanently memorable in any action or situation. It must have the compression and conciseness of a real inscription, and in proportion to the smallness of its bulk must be highly finished, evenly balanced, simple, and lucid. In literature it holds something of the same place as is held in art by an engraved gem. But