And what do we find in this? We find, of course, verbal explanation in floods, in oceans, sometimes of the most valueless, often of the most valuable kind. We find laborious comment on etymology (not quite so often valuable as eccentric), on grammar (invaluable often), on mythology, &c., &c., giving us what, whether it be artistically worthy or worthless, we often could not otherwise by any possibility know. We get the most painstaking, if not always the most illuminative or illuminated, discussions of the poet’s meaning, handled simply, handled allegorically, handled “this way, that way, which way you please.” Not seldom, as elsewhere (in Eustathius, for instance), we get certain references to Figures and the technical rules of Rhetoric, which touch the outer skirts, the fringes, of literary criticism itself. But of that criticism, as represented even in Dionysius, much more in Longinus, the allowance is astonishingly small. You may read page after page, volume after volume, and find absolutely nothing, or next to nothing, of the sort. Take, for instance, the two volumes of Scholia on the Odyssey, as published by Dindorf—on the Odyssey, the very touchstone of all Greek literature for literary criticism, and one which proves the gold in Longinus at the very moment that it shows what we may think not so golden in him. You turn and turn. Besides the matter classified above, a great many extremely valuable, or at worst more or less curious, thoughts meet you. You will be informed (on Od. ii. 99) that “It is natural to women to dislike the parents of their husbands”; on vi. 137, that “All youth is fearful because of its want of experience, but especially female youth.” You will find examples of the puerile quibbling of Zoilus, such as that it was unlikely that exactly six sailors were taken from each ship; with the common-sense, if not much less puerile, retort that it is difficult to get ἑβδομήκοντα δύο into verse. But such things are no great windfall; and such others as the observation, at 391 of the same book, on the poet’s wonderful faculty and daring in making the sound suit the sense, and of showing in that sound “all the sorrow of the sight,” are very rare. They still more rarely soar above observations on special points, or reach criticism of general handling of the relations of one part of the story to another, of its pervading poetical quality and charm. For one note, vol. i. p. 425, a little farther on, as to the variety and aptness of the Homeric compound epithets for beasts, we shall find pages and sheets of mere trifling. And when we get a more thoughtful examination (see, for instance, that given as apparently Porphyry’s in the Appendix, ii. 789, on the conduct of Ulysses in selecting the persons to whom he shall first reveal himself), it strikes one at once that these, like the comments above cited on the Ajax, are comments on the action, on the dramatic structure, and not on the literary execution.
It is the same—it is perhaps even more the same—if we turn to the Iliad. The famous first words elicit naturally a good deal[[84]] of comment, which has some promise. Why did he begin with “wrath,” which is an ill-sounding word? For two reasons. First, that he might purify the corresponding part of the souls of his readers by the passions, &c. Secondly, that he might give his “praises of the Greeks” greater verisimilitude. Besides, this was the practical subject with which he was first to deal as in a kind of tragic prologue. Then there is an odd gradation of the states of wrath itself, from ὀργὴ to μῆνις. Next, an inquiry why the poet begins with the end of the war, and so forth. This, of course, is literary criticism of a sort, but on thin and threadbare lines enough; and there is not very much even of this. The scholiasts are far more at home with accentuation and punctuation; with the endless question of athetesis (or blackmarking, as spurious); with such technical ticketings as at i. 366: “The trope is anakephalaiosis.[[85]] There are four kinds of narrative—homiletic, apangeltic, hypostatic,[[86]] and mixed”; or with such curiously unintelligent attempts to pin down poetic beauty as the note at i. 477 on ῥοδοδάκτυλος as a synecdoche, in which, by the way, even the colour-scheme seems to be misunderstood.
At the close of these remarks on the Scholiasts I must enter in a fresh form the caveat which has perhaps been wearisomely iterated, but which it is better to repeat too often than to suppress even in a single place where its omission might mislead. I am not finding fault with these laborious and invaluable persons for not doing what they had not the least intention to do. I am not (Heaven forbid!) arguing for any superiority in the modern critic over the ancient. I am only endeavouring to show that the subjects to which modern literary critics—who, as it seems to me, stick to their business most closely, and abstain most from metabasis ἐς ἄλλο γένος—pay most attention, were precisely those to which ancient critics, as a matter of fact, paid least. And this it is not only the right but the duty of the historian to point out.
Nor will it, I trust, while we are thus examining Miscellanea, be considered frivolous or superfluous to examine |The Literary Epigrams of the Anthology.| that vast mass of information on Greek life and thought after the Golden Age which is called the Greek Anthology,[[87]] to see whether it can afford us any light. In this mass, with its thousands of articles ranging from exquisite to contemptible in actual literary quality, the range of subject is notoriously as wide as that of merit. The devotees of the Minor Muses of Hellas will “rhyme,” as we should say, anything from a riddle and an arithmetical conundrum, to Myron’s cow and the complimentary statues to the latest fashionable athlete. It would be odd, therefore, if books and authors escaped or were ignored, and they duly appear. In the battalions of adespota, besides a stray versification[[88]] of the rules for making iambics, and a wail[[89]] from some grammarian unnamed that he cannot write as well as Palladius or Palladas, we come to a considerable body[[90]] of literary epigrams arranged, by some one or other of the numerous ancient editors of the Anthology, in vaguely chronological order of subject. First, as in duty bound, come Linus and Orpheus, then a considerable batch on Homer, and then the long succession of poets and philosophers, dramatists and historians, to follow. For the most part, of course, the epigrams contain generalities and commonplaces, but with more or less of the neatness and prettiness that we associate with the very name of the Anthology; sometimes they go a little closer to the matter, as in the piece (523 of Jacobs) on Erinna’s much-praised “Distaff.” As we have only five[[91]] (and those not consecutive) out of the three hundred verses which this girl of nineteen years composed, it would be rash as well as unkind to question the judgment of the epigrammatist that they are “equal to Homer.” But it may safely be said that the judgment itself is in a rudimentary style of criticism. It is natural, but rather “tell-tale,” that the critic-poets always, when they can, take some non-literary point—Anacreon’s fondness for wine, the equality in number of the Muses and the books of Herodotus, the supposed physical and moral shortcomings of Aristotle, and the like. But sometimes they go higher. There is plenty of spirit and sense in the epigram on Panætius for pronouncing the Phædo spurious,—as is well known, this idlest of critical debauches was at least as great a favourite with the ancients as with the moderns (548). Sometimes we get valuable testimony as to popular judgments—the unfeigned admiration which was felt for Menander, though the sounder critics might put him below Aristophanes; the mighty repute of Aristides of Smyrna (see p. 113) who is pretty certainly not the Aristides congratulated ironically in another epigram as never having less than seven auditors—the four walls of the room, and the three benches in it. Perhaps Claudian is a little overparted with the “mind of Virgil and the Muse of Homer.” But all decadences are given to exaggeration of this kind; and the reviews of the closing years of the nineteenth century in England will furnish much more extravagant instances of comparison.
The work of known, or at least named, individuals is less noteworthy in bulk, and not much more so in kind and degree. The right happy industry of Meleager appears to have helped in preserving for us no small proportion of the minor work of the great men of old. But his own quintessenced and not seldom charming pen is devoted to subjects always less solemn, and sometimes very much less worthy, than literature. These elders themselves (as indeed we should expect) meddle with literature but rarely; while their successors, the early Alexandrians, are less copious than we might have expected. Simmias of Thebes (perhaps not the same who outraged[[92]] the feelings of neo-classic critics, from Addison downwards, two thousand years later, by composing verse-eggs and -hatchets) has left us a couple of elegant and regular, though rather vague and slight, epigrams on Sophocles;[[93]] Philiscus of Miletus, who was at least old enough to be a pupil of Isocrates, a pompous eulogium of Lysias;[[94]] while no less a person than Thucydides has the credit of one[[95]] on the Third Tragedian, which if extravagant in tone is neat in expression. Of the compliments[[96]] to Aristophanes and Sappho, which are similarly attributed to Plato, the former, with its consecration of the soul of the great comic poet as the temenos of the Graces, is far the better. But the nearest approach to literature among the verses attributed to Plato’s mightiest rival is a quaint bundle (no small one)[[97]] of epitaphs on the Homeric heroes. Of course these attributions are in all cases very doubtful, and possibly not in a single one correct; but the fact of them for literary history remains the same.
If we turn to others, we shall draw some of the most flourishing coverts in vain, but find something elsewhere. Erycius of Cyzicus[[98]] has a spirited retort to an insulter of Homer, and a generous eulogium of Sophocles—it is noteworthy that these two most unite the Anthological, as the general, suffrage. Palladas handles Homer’s dealings with women,[[99]] elsewhere[[100]] jests ruefully about having to sell his books, even Callimachus and Pindar, and moralises[[101]] the story of Circe, rather stupidly, but in a fashion for which he might find only too many compurgators in antiquity. Pollianus[[102]] rallies (not disagreeably) the stealers of Homeric tags and phrases; and a certain Cyrus accomplishes[[103]] a mild couplet to complete his own witty conceit of erecting a statue of Pindar at a bath. The long and curious poem[[104]] of Christodorus Coptites on the statues in the Gymnasium of Zeuxippus naturally has a great many literary allusions. Agathias—a somewhat major star than most of these, and one whose pursuits earned him the special surname of Scholasticus—has, so far as I remember, only two literary epigrams[[105]] on statues of Æsop and Plutarch. Another “Scholasticus,” scarcely distinguished more by the name of Thomas, announces that he has three “stars in rhetoric”—Demosthenes, Aristides, and Thucydides[[106]]—praising especially the pains of the first, but seeming actually to prefer the two latter. Leon, the philosopher, has a little handful[[107]] of epigrams on books, chiefly of science and philosophy, and a Homeric cento not more respectable than such things usually are.
The great name of Theocritus is attached[[108]] to pieces, not inelegant but very distinctly banal, on Anacreon, Epicharmus, Archilochus, Hipponax; and that of the lesser Alcæus (not the great one of Mitylene, but the much lesser Messenian) to some praises of Homer,[[109]] of Hesiod,[[110]] and again of Hipponax. Dioscorides[[111]] extols Sappho, defends the much-injured Philænis against those who (to judge from confirmatory testimony to the same effect elsewhere) played upon her the same ignoble trick by which a certain Frenchman, in days nearer our own, tried to blast the fair fame of Luisa Sigea of Toledo. He is complimentarily orthodox as to Sophocles, but not much less complimentary to Sositheus, of whom we know little, and to Macho, of whom, thanks to Athenæus, we know that he exercised his wits upon putting naughty anecdotes into uncommonly pedestrian verse. An epigram of the Grammarian Crates[[112]] refers to the controversy on the respective merits of Chœrilus, Antimachus, and Homer, and would have been very welcome if it had given us some information on that matter; but as it is, the subject is a mere pretext to enable Crates to “talk greasily.” Antipater of Sidon,[[113]] starting from the childish debate about the birthplace of Homer, turns it into something better by his conclusion—
“Thy country is great Heaven: there was to thee
No mortal mother, but Calliope”;
and he subsequently celebrates Sappho, “Erinna of few verses,” and Pindar, returning to the same subjects (except Erinna) in another batch, and adding a group on Anacreon (who, as fertile in commonplaces, is a favourite subject of the Anthologians), Stesichorus, and Ibycus.