These quotations are sufficient to set forth the purity of Meleager's style, though many more examples might have been borrowed from his epigrams on the cicada, on the mosquitoes who tormented Zenophila, on Antiochus, who would have been Eros if Eros had worn the boy's petasos and chlamys. The next point to notice about him is the suggestiveness of his language, his faculty of creating the right epithets and turning the perfect phrase that suits his meaning. The fragrance of the second line in this couplet is undefinable but potent:
ὦ δυσέρως ψυχὴ παῦσαί ποτε καὶ δι' ὀνείρων
εἰδώλοις κάλλευς κωφὰ χλιαινομένη.[215]
It is what all day-dreamers and castle-builders, not to speak of the dreamers of the night, must fain cry out in their despair. The common motive of a lover pledging his absent mistress is elevated to a region of novel beauty by the passionate repetition of words in this first line:
ἔγχει καὶ πάλιν εἰπὲ πάλιν πάλιν Ἡλιοδώρας.[216]
In the same way a very old thought receives new exquisiteness the last couplet of the epitaph on Heliodora:
ἀλλά σε γουνοῦμαι Γᾶ παντρόφε τὰν πανόδυρτον
ἠρέμα σοῖς κόλποις μᾶτερ ἐναγκάλισαι.[217]
The invocation to Night, which I will next quote, has its own beauty derived from the variety of images which are subtly and capriciously accumulated:
ἓν τόδε παμμήτειρα θεῶν λίτομαί σε φίλη Νύξ
ναὶ λίτομαι κώμων σύμπλανε πότνια Νύξ.[218]
But Meleager's epithets for Love are, perhaps, the triumphs of his verbal coinage:
ἔστι δ' ὁ παῖς γλυκύδακρυς ἀείλαλος ὠκὺς ἀταρβὴς
σιμὰ γελῶν πτερόεις νῶτα φαρετροφόρος.[219]