The Greek Anthology - Introduction
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Select Epigrams from The Greek Anthology
Edited with a Revised Text, Translation, and Notes, by J. W. Mackail
London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1890
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INTRODUCTION 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 war- chants 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 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 non- elegiac 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-and- twenty 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 vocabulary of Callimachus too is practically the same as that of Simonides. ----------
[1] The first inscriptions of all were probably in hexameter: cf. Hdt. v. 59.
[2] Horace, A. P., ll. 75-8, leaves the origin of elegiac verse in obscurity. When he says it was first used for laments, he probably follows the Alexandrian derivation of the word {elegos} from {e legein}. The /voti sententia compos/ to which he says it became extended is interpreted by the commentators as meaning amatory poetry. If this was Horace's meaning he chose a most singular way of expressing it.
[3] Mr. F. D. Allen's treatise /On Greek Versification in Inscriptions/ (Boston, 1888) gives an account of the slight changes in structure (caesura, etc.) between earlier and later periods.
[4] Cf. infra, III. 2, VII., 4, X. 45, XII. 18, I. 30, IX. 23.
[5] From the Leominster MS. circ. A.D. 1307 (Percy Society, 1842).
