THE CHARM OF THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY Why should little things be blamed? T. P. ROGERS (Anth. Pal. ix. 784). Dew from the mountains of morn distilled on the shores of the sunset ; Gleams of the glory of Greece, gilding our ultimate clime. ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES (Spectator, March 1, 1919). TWENTY centuries have passed since the first collection was made of the little flowers of Greek poetry, and with many later accessions the book still lays its spell over the educated world. It was in the latter part of the first century B.C. that a Greek poet, born at Gadara but settled in the island of Cos, put together the collection of minor poetry which is the prototype of all anthologies, florilegia, golden treasuries, and garlands from his day to ours. Of the "Garland of Meleager," as he compiled it, only his prefatory poem survives, but in the tenth century of our era a scholar named Cephalas re-arranged Meleager's book, adding many pieces from later collections of the kind. In the early part of the fourteenth century, Maximus Planudes, theologian, grammarian, and rhetorician, brought out a new Anthology founded on that of Cephalas, but with additions and omissions. This Planudean Anthology, first printed in 1494, for a long time held the field. In 1606–7 Claude de Saumaise, better known as Milton's antagonist Salmasius, discovered in the library of the Counts Palatine at Heidelberg a manuscript of the Anthology of Cephalas: this is the Palatine Anthology. But Salmasius died before he had completed his edition of the Palatine MS.; the MS. itself passed through various vicissitudes, and it was not till the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century that a complete edition of the Anthology, collated from those of Cephalas and Planudes, was available. The collection has been edited and selected by scholars of many countries in successive centuries, and to translate pieces from it has been a favourite pastime with many sorts and conditions of men. The charm has not, it is true, always been felt. The Greek Anthology was one of the things which Lord Chesterfield advised his son to avoid : "I hope you will keep company with Horace and Cicero among the Romans, and Homer and Xenophon among the Greeks, and that you have got out of the worst company in the world-the Greek epigrams. Martial has wit, and is worth VIII DE GUSTIBUS 299 And looking into sometimes; but I recommend the Greek epigrams to your supreme contempt." in France the expression à la Grecque, applied to a thin and indifferent soup, is said to have been derived from the supposed insipidity of Greek 'epigrams.” In our own time the Anthology has been dismissed by a famous scholar, not so much as too thin, but rather as too highly spiced. "No study seems to me," we read, "more wearisome and profitless than the Anthology. There is such obvious artificiality, such posing, such false joy and grief, such sacrifice of substance to form, that the soul of the reader who thirsts after the real companionship of other souls is like the despairing Dido in her dreams : semper longam incomitata videtur ire viam et Tyrios deserta quaerere terra." Sir John Mahaffy, who did not often hanker after the accepted views, claimed in this case that he was "taking sides with the great bulk of classical readers by whom this collection of poems has been treated with neglect." On the side of the minority (if such it be), I call three modern wit nesses. "The Anthology," wrote Mr. Symonds, may from some points of view be regarded as 1 Aeneid, iv. 467, thus rendered by Conington : And still companionless she seems Through desert regions, ah, how bleak ! the most valuable relic of antique literature which we possess. "There is no book in my library," says Mr. Frederic Harrison, "which I take down and taste with the gusto of an epicure more often than Mackail's Greek Anthology." "Mr. Gladstone 82 to-day," wrote Lord Morley on December 29, 1891; "I gave him Mackail's Greek Epigrams, and if it affords him half as much pleasure as it has given me, he will be very grateful." The difference of opinion disclosed in such judgements has led a scholar to propound the question, Whether there is any standard of literary taste?1 But in this case of the Greek Anthology there is room for both opinions. The collection is of 14,000 pieces, and they are of all sorts-good, bad, and indifferent. The terms may be taken in a moral as well as in a literary sense. There is much in the collection which is tiresome, much also which is repulsive, and even in the better sort there is a certain monotony. The Anthology is one of those books which call for dipping and skipping, or which may best be read in Selections. Let us then be reconciled. Let us concede to Sir John Mahaffy that the bulk of classical readers have treated the bulk of the Anthology with neglect. But the fact that Mr. Mackail's "Select Epigrams" has reached a third edition, and the long list of translations which is given on another page must be taken as proof that Mr. Symonds, 1 See Mr. Hugh Platt's A Last Ramble in the Classics. VIII "FULL OF QUOTATIONS" 301 Mr. Harrison, and Lord Morley are not alone in their taste, and that the charm of the best things in the Anthology, which has been felt by poets and scholars in the past, is still potent in these latter days. One source of charm in reading the Anthology is to find-as did he who came fresh to Hamlet"how full it is of quotations." When Shakespeare himself wrote that "all the world's a stage," he was elaborating the comparison made by Palladas of Alexandria in an epigram (x. 72) thus rendered by Robert Bland: This life a theatre we well may call, Where every actor must perform with art, In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom pronounces that "Reason and love keep little company now-a-days"; it was the same in the days of Meleager, And what is Reason to Love?" (xii. 117). In Sonnet cxlvi. it is said, "And Death once dead, there's no more dying then." Palladas had ended a sombre epigram with a like thought: "Weep not," he says, "for him who departs from life, for after death there is no other suffering" (x. 59). And when Romeo speaks of himself as "Fortune's fool," he was anticipated by 1 The most curious parallel, however, is this passage ascribed to Democritus : ὁ κόσμος σκηνή, ὁ βίος πάραδος· ἦλθες, εἶδες, ἀπῆλθες. |