in the interpretation of a department of Greek literature which is peculiarly hard to interpret.

Not least, perhaps indeed greatest, among the English interpreters of the Anthology is John Addington Symonds. In him was found that combination of the genius of the scholar and the poet, which, though not rare, was seldom more happily blended. He seems to live in the Greek spirit; and so the spirit of the Greek lives again in his

verse.

Within the last few months a new collection of verse renderings from the Anthology has appeared, which contains many charming translations and adaptations from the Greek. The author, Mr Pott, has perhaps in too many instances allowed himself the freedom of the adapter, rather than confined himself to the rigidity of the translator, but he is gifted with a poetic sense which has enabled him to produce a very delightful volume of verse. Now and then he is very happy in his rendering of a difficult original, as in the case of the peculiarly striking and, to the verse translator, peculiarly tantalising epigram of Paulus Silentiarius, Ούνομά μοι-τί δὲ τοῦτο ;

'My name and country were . . . no matter what!
Noble my race . . . who cares though it were not?
The fame I won in life . . . is all forgot!

Now here I lie . . . and no one cares a jot!'

These poems are sometimes called Epigrams. If by epigram be meant the incisive expression of a striking idea, then many of them cannot be called by the name.

'What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole,
Its being brevity and wit its soul.'

There can be no question that it was the existence of a large number of epigrams in previous literature which suggested their collection into one book, first made in anything like its present form by Meleager in the century preceding the Christian era. But he widened the concept by including in the collection a large number of brief lyrics, which, though epigrammatic in expression, are not epigrams in the same sense as the verses of Simonides. The early epigrams are, as their name implies, inscriptions; and the limitations imposed by the material on which they were engraved forced the composer to be

concise in expression, and brought into being a literary type which has both excited the admiration and exercised the ingenuity of succeeding ages. Purists of various periods were inclined to protest against the inclusion in successive collections of matter which was not in strict epigrammatic form. Parmenio of Macedon in the early days of the Roman principate inveighed against this tendency, in a verse in which he compared the epigram with the sprint race in the stadium.

'The epigram of many lines does violence to poetic art;

You find not in the stadium a course which wearies you to death

A course which circles many times towards the point from which you start;

Its race is run at topmost speed and taken at a single breath.'

But, fortunately for the later world, those who made the various collections of so-called epigrams both before and after the time of Parmenio did not adhere to his purism; otherwise many beautiful short poems included in the final collection would have passed into oblivion.

Strangely modern as they are in many of their ideas, these poems present nevertheless in certain respects a very marked contrast to many sentiments and modes of expressing them which are characteristic of modern poetry. The joys of the men of the old world are fiercer, their sorrows more despairing, than our own. But that old world is nearer to us in its sorrows than in its joys. The comparison is well shown in Tom Moore's paraphrase of Antipater of Sidon's epitaph on Anacreon (ed. 1840).

'At length thy golden hours have wing'd their flight,
And drowsy death thine eyelid steepeth;

Thy harp, that whisper'd through each lingering night,
Now mutely in oblivion sleepeth.

She too, for whom that heart profusely shed
The purest nectar of its numbers,

She, the young spring of thy desires, hath fled,
And with her blest Anacreon slumbers.
Farewell! thou hast a pulse for every dart
That Love could scatter from his quiver;
And each new beauty found in thee a heart,
Which thou, with all thy soul, didst give her.'

Despite the fierce animalism of some of the erotic fragments, the general tone of the poems is sad. The Greek might have borrowed from the Latin the splendid commonplace of Virgil, 'Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt,' as a motto for the whole. It is easy to imagine, in fact we know, that the ancient world was haunted with the fear of death; but no other branch of ancient literature shows so clearly as the Anthology the extent to which the fear pervaded the life of the early centuries. The old Homeric idea that the future life was at best a thin, colourless presentment of the present, lived on for more than a thousand years after Homer's time. Side by side with it existed another view, still older it may be, that the spirit of man dwelt with the body in the grave; and, emanating from this, the belief that the ghost could not be happy unless the body were buried amid the surroundings which the dead had known and loved in life. This feeling is apparent in epitaphs of quite late date. It is most apparent in those on the shipwrecked, whose bodies have been buried on some far-off shore. But the belief gradually died away, killed partly by the teaching of philosophy, partly by a pessimism which taught that it matters not where you die, since all ways lead to death. We find this in the verse of an anonymous writer, who lived probably about the beginning of the Christian era:

'Whether within the Attic land you go to meet your fate, Or breathe your last at Meroë, the path to death is straight. So grieve not if afar from home you leave this upper air ; To him who sails the ways of death all winds alike are fair.'

A similar idea is found in the verse of Leonidas of Tarentum:

'With courage seek the kingdom of the dead;

The path before you lies:

It is not hard to find, nor tread;

No rocks to climb, no lanes to thread;

But broad and straight, and even still,

And ever greatly slopes down hill:

You cannot miss it, though you shut your eyes.'

-C. Merivale.

A commonplace, to the present world, this idea that all ways lead to death; but then so many of the common

places of literature are originally striking expressions of truths or of ideas which, once expressed, make a wide appeal to the human imagination. The genesis and growth of the commonplace is well illustrated in this thousand years of song. It was a fine creation of fancy to represent the spirit of the shipwrecked sailor buried on the shore as tormented by the thunder of those waves which had brought him to his death. Archias of Byzantium stole the idea from Leonidas of Tarentum; but we may pardon a literary thief who plagiarises so sweetly.

'Crushed by the waves upon the crag was I,

Who still must hear these waves among the dead,
Breaking and brawling on the promontory,
Sleepless; and sleepless is my weary head!
For me did strangers bury on the coast
Within the hateful hearing of the deep;
Nor death, that lulleth all, can lull my ghost,
One sleepless soul among the souls that sleep.'

-A. Lang.

The fantastic but striking idea of the wasps making their nest in the tomb of the man of bitter tongue is represented more than once in the Anthology. It appears in the last lines of Gaitoulichus' literary epitaph on Archilochus :

'Tread circumspectly, traveller, if nigh his tomb thou roam, Lest thou disturb the fierce wasps which make therein their home.'

But bitterness, sorrow, and gloom are not the only notes which are struck in the epitaphs. Simonides seeks to banish the bitterness of death by an appeal to the glory of patriotism. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to reproduce in a translation a true sense of that beauty of sentiment and of language which is so peculiarly his own. Many have essayed to do so; but success has been rare and never complete. W. G. Headlam's version of the epitaph on the Athenian dead at Plataea comes nearest perhaps to the spirit of Simonides' verse:

'If the best merit be to lose life well,

To us beyond all else that fortune came:
In war, to give Greece liberty, we fell,
Heirs of all time's imperishable fame.'

Simonides praised a patriotism which his fellow-countrymen but imperfectly understood; and, such as it was, it passed away even from literature with the passing of the citizen army. The virtue vanishes from the Greek epigram after the close of the fifth century.

There can be little doubt that the Mysteries of Eleusis, with their doctrine of the immortality of the soul, did something to dispel, in the minds of the initiated, some of the gloom which the pessimism of the old ideas as to the after-life laid upon the world. But there is but little trace of its effect in the Anthology, save in the verses of Crinagoras, who lived in Rome during the later days of Augustus:

'E'en shouldst thou live the quiet life, nor sail
The sea, nor travel on the land,

To journey unto Attica thou shouldst not fail,
And on Demeter's nights of worship stand
Within her temple. Thus of life's dull care
Thou shalt be free; and, when thou goest where
We all must dwell, thy spirit shall not quail.'

The sentiment is beautiful; but, coming from the mind of a writer of the first century after Christ, its genuineness as an expression of faith may be doubted.

The effect of philosophy on men's minds was twofold, tending, on the one hand, to the hope of immortality in a happy future, on the other, to a creed of annihilation. Of nihilistic pessimism the Anthology is full, possibly because some really believed in it, possibly because as a social pose it added an interest to the soi-disant professor of it. It is sometimes treated gravely, sometimes in a light vein. There is a terribly grim humour about Callimachus' epitaph on Charidas of Cyrene; but it expresses what was very widely believed in that Alexandrian society in which the author had so high a place in the middle of the third century before Christ. It is an example of that weird fancy which prompted men to write epitaphs in dialogue. Here is a paraphrase rendering of it :—

"Does Charidas beneath thee lie?" "He does, an be it mean ye

Arimmas' son who came to die

From Libyan Cyrene."