Eupho’rion, author of three heroic poems and a celebrated grammar—Apollodorus, the didactic poet—and Melea’ger the Exquisite, flourished in the Alexandrian age. Meleager’s “Garland” was the first anthology, or collection of epigrams. An’yte of Arcadia, “the female Homer,” and Nossis, the Locrian poetess (300 B.C.), wrote epigrams. Cleanthes, the persevering disciple of Zeno (300-220 B.C.), composed moral treatises and a hymn to Jupiter full of lofty sentiments.
CHAPTER VII.
LATER GREEK LITERATURE.
Extinction of Greek Genius.—The long period which now engages our attention is marked by a further decline, and the ultimate extinction of letters. Roman despotism was inimical to literature; Greece lay prostrate and broken-spirited; night was fast settling down on the world. Poetry, a faint shadow of its former self, appeared principally in epigrams. The prose of the early Christian centuries exhibits some exceptional gleams, but they are only the flickerings of a dying flame.
About the Christian Era is gathered a group of geographical and historical writers with Stra’bo, Diodo’rus Sic’ulus, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus as the prominent figures. The first century after Christ presents to us the authors of the New Testament; Clement of Rome, an eminent authority with the early Christians; and Josephus, the Jewish historian, all of whom wrote in Greek. Plutarch, the eminent biographer, born about 50 A.D., lived through the first twenty years of the second century, which was also adorned with the names of Lucian and Pausanias the geographer. In the third century flourished Longi’nus, the greatest rhetorician of this later age; while the writings of the Christian fathers extend over a period of several hundred years, from the time of Clement just named.
After the fall of Rome (476 A.D.), Constantinople became the sole centre of letters, and there for nearly a thousand years they languished. After Mahomet II. carried the city by storm in 1453, the native scholars dispersed over Europe, and by awakening an interest in classical studies contributed not a little to the revival of letters.
THE FIRST CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST.
Diodorus Siculus (the Sicilian) was the author of “the Historical Library,” which cost him thirty years of labor. Unfolding the story of the human race from remote antiquity to the time of Julius Cæsar, his work contains much valuable information.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus.—The longest production of this writer is his “Roman Antiquities,” a history of Rome prior to the Punic wars, pervaded by an evident partiality for Greece and her institutions. Dionysius was also a rhetorician of the highest rank, as his critical essays on the eloquence of Demosthenes, the style of Thucydides, and other subjects, testify.
Strabo, of Pontus in Asia Minor, must be remembered in connection with his “Geography,” still extant, an interesting work in seventeen books, for which he prepared himself by travels in Asia, Africa, and Europe. It is not a mere tissue of names and statistics, but is lighted up with sketches of social life, pleasant stories, and epitomes of political history, thus entertaining at the same time that it instructs.