Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology | Page 7

jest or a great moral idea, the sigh of a lover or the lament over a
perished Empire.[4]
The Palatine Anthology as it has come down to us includes a small
proportion, less than one in ten, of poems in other metres than the
elegiac. Some do not properly belong to the collection, as for instance
the three lines of iambics heading the Erotic section and the two
hendecasyllabics at the end of it, or the two hexameters at the
beginning of the Dedicatory section. These are hardly so much
insertions as accretions. Apart from them there are only four nonelegiac
pieces among the three hundred and eight amatory epigrams. The three
hundred and fifty-eight dedicatory epigrams include sixteen in
hexameter and iambic, and one in hendecasyllabic; and among the
seven hundred and fifty sepulchral epigrams are forty-two in hexameter,
iambic, and other mixed metres. The Epideictic section, as one would
expect from the more miscellaneous nature of its contents, has a larger
proportion of non-elegiac pieces. Of the eight hundred and
twenty-seven epigrams no less than a hundred and twenty-nine are in
hexameter (they include a large number of single lines), twenty-seven
in iambic, and six others in various unusual metres, besides one (No.
703) which comes in strangely enough: it is in prose: and is the
inscription in commendation of the water of the Thracian river Tearos,
engraved on a pillar by Darius, transcribed from Herodotus, iv. 91. The
odd thing is that the collector of the Anthology appears to have thought
it was in verse. The Hortatory section includes a score of hexameter
and iambic fragments, some of them proverbial lines, others extracts
from the tragedians. The Convivial section has five-andtwenty in

hexameter, iambic, and hemiambic, out of four hundred and forty-two.
The Musa Stratonis, in which the hand of the Byzantine editor has had
a less free play, is entirely in elegiac. But the short appendix next
following it in the Palatine MS. consists entirely of epigrams in various
metres, chiefly composite. Of the two thousand eight hundred and
thirteen epigrams which constitute the Palatine Anthology proper,
(sections V., VI., VII., IX., X., and XI.), there are in all a hundred and
seventy-five in hexameter, seventy-seven in iambic, and twenty-two in
various other metres. In practise, when one comes to make a selection,
the exclusion of all non-elegiac pieces leads to no difficulty.
Nothing illustrates more vividly the essential unity and continuous life
of Greek literature than this line of poetry, reaching from the period of
the earliest certain historical records down to a time when modern
poetry in the West of Europe had already established itself; nothing
could supply a better and simpler corrective to the fallacy, still too
common, that Greek history ends with the conquests of Alexander. It is
on some such golden bridge that we must cross the profound gulf
which separates, to the popular view, the sunset of the Western Empire
of Rome from the dawn of the Italian republics and the kingdoms of
France and England. That gulf to most persons seems impassable, and
it is another world which lies across it. But here one sees how that
distant and strange world stretches out its hands to touch our own. The
great burst of epigrammatic poetry under Justinian took place when the
Consulate of Rome, after more than a thousand years' currency, at last
ceased to mark the Western year. While Constantinus Cephalas was
compiling his Anthology, adding to the treasures of past times much
recent and even contemporary work, Athelstan of England inflicted the
great defeat on the Danes at Brunanburh, the song of which is one of
the noblest records of our own early literature; and before Planudes
made the last additions the Divine Comedy was written, and our
English poetry had broken out into the full sweetness of its flower:
Bytuene Mershe ant Averil
When spray beginneth to springe,
The
lutel foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud to synge.[5]
It is startling to think that so far as the date goes this might have been

included in the Planudean Anthology.
Yet this must not be pressed too far. Greek literature at the later
Byzantine Court, like the polity and religion of the Empire, was a
matter of rigid formalism; and so an epigram by Cometas Chartularius
differs no more in style and spirit from an epigram by Agathias than
two mosaics of the same dates. The later is a copy of the earlier,
executed in a somewhat inferior manner. Even in the revival of poetry
under Justinian it is difficult to be sure how far the poetry was in any
real sense original, and how far it is parallel to the Latin verses of
Renaissance scholars. The vocabulary of these poets is practically the
same as that of Callimachus; but the