The best opportunity for acquaintance with the field of epigram is afforded by Mackail, 'Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology,' text, translation, introduction and notes (Lon don 1906) •, translation alone (ib., 1908). The
A number of noteworthy qualities may be enumerated as accounting for the interest of the Anthology. In the first place, it is a re markable example of continuity and homo geneity in the attitude of a race toward the problem of life. Covering a period which be gins 700 years before Christ and extends 1,000 years into the modern era, its 4,100 miniature poems, together with the 2,400 of kindred char acter found outside its limits, "draw for us in little," as Mackail says, "a picture of the Greek ideal with all its virtues and all its failings: it may be taken as an epitome, slightly sketched with a facile hand, of the book of Greek life' This may be said with full consciousness of the differences between the Byzantine Greek and the pagan Greek of the Golden Age. In the second place, the Anthology is an even more remarkable example of the persistence of an ideal of language and form. Throughout the 1,700 years it exhibits the same classical purity of diction, the same overwhelming preference for the elegiac vehicle, and the same epigram matic qualities. When Planudes was making his collection, Dante had already written, and Petrarch, the Renaissance, and New Europe were at hand. Even allowing that many of the later epigrams were the product of the clever artificiality of men who, like the Renaissance Italian and the modern Greek, took pride in the demonstration by this means of their kinship with a great past, the Anthology is still a unique example of vitality in literary form. Again, the Anthology represents not only the persistence, but the perfection, of a literary species. The epigram, originally an actual inscription as its name implies, had by the time of Meleager long been literary also. The great majority of the epigrams in the Anthology are merely literary, were never inscribed on monuments and re tained the right to the name by reason of their greater or lesser conformity with the inscrip tional ideal. At their worst, they are forced, shallow, artificial and insincere, though rarely lacking in the virtue of form. Taken as a body, they are not to be ranked witl. the great examples of Greek literature. elf we might compare the study of Greek literature to a journey in some splendid mountain region,' writes John Addington Symonds, "then we might say with propriety that from the spark ling summits where Aeschylus and Sophocles and Pindar sit enthroned we turn in our less strenuous moods to gather the meadow flowers of Meleager, Palladas, Callimachus.") At their
best, however, they do not suffer from prox imity to the great. They arouse unbounded admiration as possessing, in the phrase of Mackail, "just that high note, that imaginative touch, which gives them at once the gravity of an inscription and the quality of a poem)); and as realizing the ideal defined by the same critic as follows: "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 de sired to make permanently memorable in a single action or situation. It must have the compression and conciseness of a real inscrip tion, and in proportion to the smallness of its bulk must be highly finished, evenly balanced, simple and lucid. In literature it holds some thing of the same place as is held in art by an engraved gem." Those who are not sensitive to precise, clean cut, chiselled language, neat phrasing, compression, simplicity, directness, harmonious versification —in a word, those who do not feel the glow of admiration at the beauties of conscious literary art, and even at skilful literary craftsmanship when it does not rise to heights of inspiration — will not enjoy the Anthology as it may be enjoyed.
Yet there is a final quality which brings the Anthology within the range even of readers unacquainted with the Greek tongue and not especially sensitive to form. This is its hu manity. In this as in other respects, the Anthology is to be regarded as a single docu ment rather than as the work of hundreds of hands. The epigram, more than any other species of Greek literature, tends in the reader's mind to be impersonal. It is not of the views of the poets Theocritus, Meleager, Asclepiades, Leonidas, or of the poetesses Erinna, Anyte and Nossis— the most famed of the contribu tors to the Anthology—that we think as we read, but of the Greek view; and into an ap preciation of the teeming details in Greek life that went into the making of the Greek view— of the innumerable ordinary and extraordinary sights, sounds, thoughts and emotions ex perienced in Greek existence as a whole—we can hardly enter so well by any other gate as by the Anthology. In it ewe possess," as Symonds says, an everlasting treasury of sweet thoughts. . The slight effusions of the minor poets are even nearer to our hearts than the masterpieces of the noblest Greek literature. They treat with a touching limpidity and sweet ness of the joys and fears and hopes and sor rows that are common to all humanity'