{eraman men ego sethen, Atthi, palai pota—}[8]
such simple words that have all sadness in their lingering cadences;
{Oion to glukumalon ereuthetai—
Er eti parthenias epiballomai;
Ou gar en atera pais, o gambre, toiauta—}[9]
the poetry of pure passion has never reached further than this.
But with the vast development of Greek thought and art in the fifth century B.C., there seems to have come somehow a stiffening of Greek life; the one overwhelming interest of the City absorbing individual passion and emotion, as the interest of logic and metaphysics absorbed history and poetry. The age of Thucydides and Antipho is not one in which the emotions have a change; and at Athens especially—of other cities we can only speak from exceedingly imperfect knowledge, but just at this period Athens means Greece—the relations between men and women are even under Pericles beginning to be vulgarised. In the great dramatic poets love enters either as a subsidiary motive somewhat severely and conventionally treated, as in the Antigone of Sophocles, or, as in the Phaedra and Medea of Euripides, as part of a general study of psychology. It would be foolish to attempt to defend the address of the chorus in the Antigone to Eros,[10] if regarded as the language of passion; and even if regarded as the language of criticism, it is undeniably frigid. Contrasted with the great chorus in the same play,[11] where Sophocles is dealing with a subject that he really cares about, it sounds almost artificial. And in Euripides, psychology occupies the whole of the interest that is not already preoccupied by logic and rhetoric; these were the arts of life, and with these serious writing dealt; with the heroism of Macaria, even with the devotion of Alcestis, personal passion has but little to do.
With the immense expansion of the Greek world that followed the political extinction of Greece Proper, there came a relaxation of this tension. Feeling grew humaner; social and family life reassumed their real importance; and gradually there grew up a thing till then unknown in the world, and one the history of which yet remains to be written, the romantic spirit. Pastoral poetry, with its passionate sense of beauty in nature, reacted on the sense of beauty in simple human life. The Idyls of Theocritus are full of a new freshness of feeling: {epei k esores tas parthenos oia gelanti}[12]—this is as alien from the Athenian spirit as it approaches the feeling of a medieval romance- writer: and in the Pharmaceutriae pure passion, but passion softened into exquisite forms, is once more predominant.[13] It is in this age then that we naturally find the most perfect examples of the epigram of love. In the lyric period the epigram was still mainly confined to its stricter sphere, that of inscriptions for tombs and dedicated offerings: in the great Athenian age the direct treatment of love was almost in abeyance. Just on the edge of this last period, as is usual in a time of transition, there are exquisite premonitions of the new art. The lovely hexameter fragment[14] preserved in the Anthology under the name of Plato, and not unworthy of so great a parentage, anticipates the manner and the cadences of Theocritus; and one or two of the amatory epigrams that are probably Plato's might be Meleager's, but for the severe perfection of language that died with Greek freedom. But it is in the Alexandrian period that the epigram of love flowers out; and it is at the end of that period, where the Greek spirit was touched by Oriental passion, that it culminates in Meleager.
We possess about a hundred amatory epigrams by this poet. Inferior perhaps in clearness of outline and depth of insight to those of the Alexandrian poet Asclepiades, they are unequalled in the width of range, the profusion of imagination, the subtlety of emotion with which they sound the whole lyre of passion. Meleager was born in a Syrian town and educated at Tyre in the last age of the Seleucid empire; and though he writes Greek with perfect mastery, it becomes in his hands almost a new language, full of dreams, at once more languid and more passionate. It was the fashion among Alexandrian poets to experiment in language; and Callimachus had in this way brought the epigram to the most elaborate jewel-finish; but in the work of Callimachus and his contemporaries the pure Greek tradition still survives. In Meleager, the touch of Asiatic blood creates a new type, delicate, exotic, fantastic. Art is no longer restrained and severe. The exquisite austerity of Greek poetry did not outlive the greatness of Athens; its perfect clearness of outline still survived in Theocritus; here both are gone. The atmosphere is loaded with a steam of perfumes, and with still unimpaired ease and perfection of hand there has come in a strain of the quality which of all qualities is the most remote from the Greek spirit, mysticism. Some of Meleager's epigrams are direct and simple, even to coarseness; but in all the best and most characteristic there is this vital difference from purely Greek art, that love has become a religion; the spirit of the East has touched them. It is this that makes Meleager so curiously akin to the medieval poets. Many of his turns of thought, many even of his actual expressions, have the closest parallel in poets of the fourteenth century who had never read a line of his work nor heard of his name. As in them, the religion of love is reduced to a theology; no subtlety, no fluctuation of fancy or passion is left unregistered, alike in their lighter and their graver moods. Sometimes the feeling is buried in masses of conceits, sometimes it is eagerly passionate, but even then always with an imaginative and florid passion, never directly as Sappho or Catullus is direct. Love appears in a hundred shapes amidst a shower of fantastic titles and attributes. Out of all the epithets that Meleager coins for him, one, set in a line of hauntingly liquid and languid rhythm, "delicate-sandalled,"[15] gives the key-note to the rest. Or again, he often calls him {glukupikros}, "bittersweet";[16] at first he is like wine mingled with honey for sweetness, but as he grows and becomes more tyrannous, his honey scorches and stings; and the lover, "set on fire and drenched to swooning with his ointments," drinks from a deeper cup and mingles his wine with burning tears.[17] Love the Reveller goes masking with the lover through stormy winter nights;[18] Love the Ball-player tosses hearts for balls in his hands;[19] Love the Runaway lies hidden in a lady's eyes;[20] Love the Healer soothes with a touch the wound that his own dart has made;[21] Love the Artist sets his signature beneath the soul which he has created;[22] Love the Helmsman steers the soul, like a winged boat, over the perilous seas of desire;[23] Love the Child, playing idly with his dice at sundawn, throws lightly for human lives.[24] Now he is a winged boy with childish bow and quiver, swift of laughter and speech and tears;[25] now a fierce god with flaming arrows, before whom life wastes away like wax in the fire, Love the terrible, Love the slayer of men.[26] The air all round him is heavy with the scent of flowers and ointments; violets and myrtle, narcissus and lilies, are woven into his garlands, and the rose, "lover-loving" as Meleager repeatedly calls it in one of his curious new compound epithets,[27] is perpetually about him, and rains its petals over the banqueting-table and the myrrh-drenched doorway.[28] For a moment Meleager can be piercingly simple; and then the fantastic mood comes over him again, and emotion dissolves in a mist of metaphors. But even when he is most fantastic the unfailing beauty of his rhythms and grace of his language remind us that we are still in the presence of a real art.
The pattern set by Meleager was followed by later poets; and little more would remain to say were it not necessary to notice the brief renascence of amatory poetry in the sixth century. The poets of that period take a high place in the second rank; and one, Paulus Silentiarius, has a special interest among them as being at once the most antique in his workmanship and the most modern in his sentiment. One of his epigrams is like an early poem of Shakespeare's;[29] another has in a singular degree the manner and movement of a sonnet by Rossetti.[30] This group of epigrammatists brought back a phantom of freshness into the old forms; once more the epigram becomes full of pretty rhythms and fancies, but they are now more artificial; set beside work of the best period they come out clumsy and heavy. Language is no longer vivid and natural; the colour is a little dimmed, the tone a little forced. As the painter's art had disappeared into that of the worker in mosaic, so the language of poetry was no longer a living stream, but a treasury of glittering words. Verse- writers studied it carefully and used it cleverly, but never could make up for the want of free movement of hand by any laborious minuteness of tessellation. Yet if removed from the side of their great models they are graceful enough, with a prettiness that recalls and probably in many cases is copied from the novelists of the fourth century; and sometimes it is only a touch of the diffuseness inseparable from all Byzantine writing that separates their work in quality from that of an earlier period.
After Justinian the art practically died out. The pedantic rigour of Byzantine scholarship was little favourable to the poetry of emotion, and the spoken language had now fallen so far apart from the literary idiom that only scholars were capable of writing in the old classical forms. The popular love-poetry, if it existed, has perished and left no traces; henceforth, for the five centuries that elapsed till the birth of Provençal and Italian poetry, love lay voiceless, as though entranced and entombed. —————
[1] Cf. Il. iii. 156; Anth. Pal. ix. 166.