Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology | Page 6

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 if the
definition of the epigram is only fixed thus, it is difficult to exclude
almost any very short poem that conforms externally to this standard;

while on the other hand the chance of language has restricted the word
in its modern use to a sense which it never bore in Greek at all, defined
in the line of Boileau, /un bon mot de deux rimes orné/. This sense was
made current more especially by the epigrams of Martial, which as a
rule lead up to a pointed end, sometimes a witticism, sometimes a
verbal fancy, and are quite apart from the higher imaginative qualities.
From looking too exclusively at the Latin epigrammatists, who all
belonged to a debased period in literature, some persons have been led
to speak of the Latin as distinct from the Greek sense of the word
"epigram". But in the Greek Anthology the epigrams of contemporary
writers have the same quality. The fault was that of the age, not of the
language. No good epigram sacrifices its finer poetical qualities to the
desire of making a point; and none of the best depend on having a point
at all.

[1] Hdt. v. 59.
[2] Hdt. vii. 228.
[3] III. 4 in this collection.
[4] Anth. Pal. vi. 348.
[5] Ibid. ix. 342, 369.
[6] Poet. 1449 a. 14.
[7] Simon. fr. 85 Bergk.
[8] Infra, XII. 6, 17, 37.
[9] App. Plan. 16.
[10] Anth. Pal. ix. 50, 118, x. 113.
[11] Anth. Pal. ix. 51.

[12] Infra, IX. 14, II. 14.
[13] Anth. Pal. vii. 89, ix. 367, 378.
[14] Anth. Pal. ix. 136, 362, 363.
[15] Ibid. x. 107, xi. 438, 439.
II
While the epigram is thus somewhat incapable of strict formal
definition, for all practical purposes it may be confined in Greek poetry
to pieces written in a single metre, the elegiac couplet, the metre
appropriated to inscriptions from the earliest recorded period.[1]
Traditionally ascribed to the invention of Archilochus or Callinus, this
form of verse, like the epic hexameter itself, first meets us full grown.[2]
The date of Archilochus of Paros may be fixed pretty nearly at 700 B.C.
That of Callinus of Ephesus is perhaps earlier. It may be assumed with
probability that elegy was an invention of the same early civilisation
among the Greek colonists of the eastern coast of the Aegean in which
the Homeric poems flowered out into their splendid perfection. From
the first the elegiac metre was instinctively recognised as one of the
best suited for
inscriptional poems. Originally indeed it had a much
wider area, as it afterwards had again with the Alexandrian poets; it
seems to have been the common metre for every kind of poetry which
was neither purely lyrical on the one hand, nor on the other included in
the definite scope of the heroic hexameter. The name {elegos},
"wailing", is probably as late as Simonides, when from the frequency of
its use for funeral inscriptions the metre had acquired a mournful
connotation, and become the /tristis elegeïa/ of the Latin poets. But the
warchants of Callinus and Tyrtaeus, and the political poems of the

latter, are at least fifty years earlier in date than the elegies of
Mimnermus, the first of which we have certain knowledge: and in
Theognis, a hundred years later than Mimnermus, elegiac verse
becomes a vehicle for the utmost diversity of subject, and a vehicle so
facile and flexible that it never seems unsuitable or inadequate. For at
least eighteen hundred years it remained a living metre, through all that

time never undergoing any serious modification.[3] Almost up to the
end of the Greek Empire of the East it continued to be written, in
imitation it is true of the old poets, but still with the freedom of a
language in common and uninterrupted use. As in the heroic hexameter
the Asiatic colonies of Greece invented the most fluent, stately, and
harmonious metre for continuous narrative poetry which has yet been
invented by man, so in the elegiac couplet they solved the problem,
hardly a less difficult one, of a metre which would refuse nothing,
which could rise to the occasion and sink with it, and be equally suited
to the epitaph of a hero or the verses accompanying a birthday present,
a light