Here, lastly, is an Envoy, slightly altered in the English translation from Straton's original:
It may be in the years to come
That men who love shall think of me,
And reading o'er these verses see
How love was my life's martyrdom.
Love-songs I write for him and her,
Now this, now that, as Love dictates;
One birthday gift alone the Fates
Gave me, to be Love's scrivener.
One large section of the Anthology remains to be considered. It contains what are called the ἐπιγράμματα ἐπιδεικτικά, or poems upon various subjects chosen for their propriety for rhetorical exposition. These epigrams, the favorites of modern imitators, display the Greek taste in this style of composition to the best advantage. The Greeks did not regard the epigram merely as a short poem with a sting in its tail—to quote the famous couplet:
Omne epigramma sit instar apis: sit aculeus illi:
Sint sua mella: sit et corporis exigui.[231]
True to the derivation of the word, which means an inscription or superscription, they were satisfied if an epigram were short and gifted with the honey-dews of Helicon.[232] Meleager would have called his collection a beehive, and not a flower-garland, if he had acknowledged the justice of the Latin definition which has just been cited. The epigrams of which I am about to speak are simply little occasional poems, fugitive pieces, Gelegenheitsgedichte, varying in length from two to twenty lines, composed in elegiac metre, and determined, as to form and treatment, by the exigencies of the subject. Some of them, it is true, are noticeable for their point; but point is not the same as sting. The following panegyric of Athens, for example, approximates to the epigram as it is commonly conceived (ii. 13):
γῇ μὲν ἔαρ κόσμος πολυδένδρεος, αἰθέρι δ' ἄστρα,
Ἑλλάδι δ' ἥδε χθών, οἵδε δὲ τῇ πόλεϊ.[233]
The same may be said about the lines upon the vine and the goat (ii. 15; compare 20):
κἤν με φάγῃς ἐπὶ ῥίζαν ὅμως ἔτι καρποφορήσω
ὅσσον ἐπισπεῖσαί σοι τράγε θυομένῳ:[234]