CHAPTER VI.
The Greek Anthology—Greek Epigrams—Herodotus—Aristophanes—Plato.
THE Greek anthology offers to our view, in the main, a body of national sentiment and local costume. The witticisms or smart turns are generally so much a part of the life of the country and period to which they immediately appertain, that an English reader might be apt scarcely to become aware of their true drift, of the inner satirical or humorous sense in the mind and intention of their composers, if he could forget that he had under his eyes the most important productions of ancient Hellas in the way of Epigram and Epigrammatic Inscription collected together for his edification and amusement.
It is perfectly natural and fit that the facetious literature of the Greeks should partake in tone and odour of the genius, climate and society which produced it. We may not appreciate a Greek joke, because the train of associations is broken; but if it does not come home to us exactly as it was meant by the author, it remains as a contributory factor to our knowledge of a never-to-be-forgotten people.
All that I seek to urge here is, that the English school of wit has barely any archaic foreign substrata, but is, to a very large and leading extent, as my learned American acquaintance, Mr. Phelps, lately observed of our law, a product of the region which gave it birth and development. There are certain broad and general features common to all humanity at all times, and independent of conditions and place:—
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,”
and there are cases, of course, where the same happy thought has presented itself bonâ fide to different persons at different periods, to men chronologically and geographically as far removed as an Athenian of the age of Pericles and an Englishman of the age of George III. The same circumstances have a proneness to gravitate to the same issues, where it is some normal trait of human nature that is concerned, or some incident of habitual recurrence.
But the pages of this Greek Anthology, of which I employ for convenience the ordinary English version, have to be winnowed in the same proportion as those of the other classical or quasi-classical books which we have just left behind us, in order to extract matter which is perfectly intelligible without the context. For everybody must feel that a translation has no chemical virtue beyond the exchange of terms. A Greek epigram, in nine instances out of ten, is a Greek epigram none the less though it be clothed in an English dress. It is like a keyless cipher, unless the reader takes up the volume where it occurs with a mastery of the surrounding conditions, which nine Englishmen out of ten do not possess.
On the other hand, how free from temporary feeling and interest are some of the flowers in this poetical chaplet! How superior to all the mutations and vicissitudes which the land of their birth has since suffered! Their motto is Perennis et fragrans.
Take a few illustrations:—
“Said the lame to the blind, ‘On your back let me rise’;
So the eyes were the legs, and the legs were the eyes.”
“A fool, bitten by many fleas, put out the light saying, ‘You no longer see me.’”
“Why do you fruitlessly wash the body of an Indian? Forbear your art.”
“The thin Diophantus, once wishing to hang himself, laid hold of a spider’s web, and strangled himself.”
“Pheidon neither drenched me nor touched me; but, being ill of a fever, I remembered his name, and died.”
A more pungent jest on a doctor was never uttered, perhaps, than this! Nor would it be easy to discover in our modern collections more telling and ingenious skits than the two next:
“’Tis said that certain death awaits
The raven’s nightly cry;
But at the sound of Cymon’s voice
The very ravens die.”
“Lazy Mark, snug in prison, in prison to stay,
Thought confessing a murder the easiest way.”
Then how true to character and how permanent are such epigrammatic jeux d’esprit as these!
“On a Statue of Niobe.
“The gods to stone transformed me; but again
I from Praxiteles new life obtain.”
“Though to your face that mirror lies,
’Tis just the glass for you;
Demosthenes, you’d shut your eyes,
If it reflected true.”
“Some say, Nycilla, that you dye your hair—
Those jet black locks—you bought them at a fair;”
which is exactly the modern quatrain:
“The lovely hair, which Celia wears,
Is hers: who would have thought it?—
She swears ’tis hers, and true she swears;
For I know where she bought it.”
Plato is made to say of a statue: “Diodorus put to sleep this satyr, not carved it”; and Lucian is accredited with the mot that “it were easier to find white crows and winged tortoises than an orator of repute in Cappadocia.”
We come to an item, where Shakespear was unconsciously forestalled by an epigrammatist who lived eleven centuries before him—Palladas the grammarian:—
“This life a theatre we well may call,
Where every actor must perform with art:
Or laugh it through, and make a farce of all,
Or learn to bear with grace his tragic part.”
The old English proverb, “Building is a sweet impoverishing,” has its prototype in the couplet:—
“The broad highway to poverty and need
Is much to build and many mouths to feed.”
But a second strikes the imagination as equally native and verdant, from the supreme faculty which is resident in men of first-rate genius of maintaining their proximity to each successive age:—
“The Muses to Herodotus one day
Came, nine of them, and dined;
And in return, their host to pay,
Each left a book behind.”
It cannot be predicated of what follows that the lapse of years has impaired its application:—
“A boy was crowning the monument of his stepmother, thinking that her temper had been changed. But the stone, falling, killed the child, while he leaned on the grave. Shun, ye children, even the grave of a stepmother.”
There is an epigram on a miser, who calculated, while he was ill in bed, that it would cost a drachma more to live than to die, and refused to see a physician; and a second on a bad poet and a clumsy surgeon, of whom it is said that they had destroyed more persons than “the waters in the time of Deucalion, or than Phaeton, who burned up those upon the earth.”
The Anthology is of a mingled yarn, like our own Miscellanies, in which the most delicate wit and the broadest fun so frequently find themselves next neighbours. The pair which I subjoin belongs to the former and higher category:—
“The Muses, seeking for a shrine,
Whose glories ne’er should cease,
Found, as they stray’d, the soul divine
Of Aristophanes.”
“Three are the Graces. Thou wert born to be
The Grace that serves to grace the other three.”
The first of these is ascribed to Plato, who was better prepared to relish, than we can be reasonably asked to do, the faithful and diverting reflections of contemporary life and Greek human nature from the pens of the dramatists of his country. The value of such masterpieces as literary compositions and pictures of manners remains unaltered and unalterable; but upon us the comic strokes and the byplay are almost lost. Nor would it be possible to fill a small volume with bons-mots from the Greek Theatre, likely to appeal with success to the existing market. For the elements of popularity are clearly and naturally hostile to its endurance; and the narrow extent of the exceptions proves the rule. The bulk of our own popular literature of all kinds is feuille-morte; and no artificial reproduction can make it otherwise than archæologically instructive. To reprint a book which is dead is to make it die twice.
Out of these Lives of Philosophers, this Table-Talk of Athenæus, these Attic Nights, and this Florilegium of satire and wit, the Anthology, what sort of sum-total does the harvestman gather in? But unless by a strange accident the best specimens of the Greek Muse in the present direction or department have unexceptionally disappeared, these must have constituted the staple material with which the Athenian Club of the Sixty amused themselves and their correspondents.
The story about Philip and his connection with this body perhaps sets the father of Alexander before some of us in a rather new light, and in a more favourable one than other anecdotes which are associated with his name. By the way, that where the poor woman is made to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, strikes us as having more than a jocular value—as betokening the primitive condition of judicial forms in Macedon at that period.
It forms by no means the least singular of survivals that the names of several of the members of the Sixty Club have been preserved—just a tenth, including that of one who was nicknamed the Lobster. The Sixty were to Athenian society what the Literary Club was to London in the days of Reynolds and Johnson—possibly more; for it was a greater novelty and a fresher influence. But the Literary Club itself was far more than the successor of other institutions, of which earlier men, like Beaumont and Dryden, Addison and Steele, had been the ornament and the life.
The modern manner of epigrammatic wit may be intrinsically similar to that of the Greeks, but certainly diverges from it widely enough in point of detail and colour. I am only at present, however, dealing with the principia of the subject, and shewing, as well as I can, to what extent the ancients laid the foundations of the wealth in this branch of culture of which we find ourselves the possessors.
But the strong influence of local atmosphere and idiom is illustrated by that epigram of Burns to Mr. Ferguson:—
“The king’s poor blackguard slave am I,
And scarce dare spare a minute;
But I’ll be wi’ you by-and-by,
Or else the devil’s in it;”
which strikes both sides of the Tweed as intelligible and clever, but would have fallen as flatly on the ear of a Greek as some of the traditional sayings in Athenæus, at which the Sixty would have clapped their hands, do on that of a modern Englishman.
The epigram lends itself with tolerable readiness to the service of the joking guild, and the rhythmical form often communicates an elegance of turn and a happiness of finish not reachable in prose. The distich of Dr. Joseph Warton on the aphorism of his friend Dr. Balguy, that wisdom was sorrow, is to the point here:—
“If what you advance, dear Doctor, be true,
That wisdom is sorrow, how wretched are you!”
where in a couplet we see combined jest, sentiment, and philosophy: a sparkling antithesis and a compliment worthy of Pope.
Sometimes the epigrammatic jest of later days confines itself to mere verbal quibble; as, for instance:—
“The French have taste in all they do,
Which we are quite without;
For nature, which to them gave goût,
To us gave only gout.”
A small thesis on international pronunciation, for which its metric dress partly helps as a passport: how lamely it would read in prose!
