[14] Anth. Pal. ix. 106.
[15] Ibid. ix. 530.
[16] Ibid. ix. 8.
[17] Ibid. ix. 172; xi. 282.
[18] Ibid. ix. 101, 257.
XIV
Of these prodigious natural forces the strongest and the most imposing is Death. Here, if anywhere, the Greek genius had its fullest scope and most decisive triumph; and here it is that we come upon the epigram in its inmost essence and utmost perfection. "Waiting to see the end" as it always did, the Greek spirit pronounced upon the end when it came with a swiftness, a tact, a certitude that leave all other language behind. For although Latin and not Greek is pre-eminently and without rival the proper and, one might almost say, the native language of monumental inscription, yet the little difference that fills inscriptions with imagination and beauty, and will not be content short of poetry, is in the Greek temper alone. The Roman sarcophagus, square hewn of rock, and bearing on it, incised for immortality, the haughty lines of rolling Republican names, represents to us with unequalled power the abstract majesty of human States and the glory of law and government; and the momentary pause in the steady current of the life of Rome, when one citizen dropped out of rank and another succeeded him, brings home to us with crushing effect, like some great sentence of Tacitus, the brief and transitory worth of a single life. /Qui apicem gessisti, mors perfecit tua ut essent omnia brevia, honos fama virtusque, gloria atque ingenium/[1]—words like these have a melancholy majesty that no other human speech has known; nor can any greater depth of pathos be reached than is in the two simple words /Bene merenti/ on a hundred Roman tombs. But the Greek mind here as elsewhere came more directly than any other face to face with the truth of things, and the Greek genius kindled before the vision of life and death into a clearer flame. The sepulchural reliefs show us many aspects of death; in all of the best period there is a common note, mingled of a grave tenderness, simplicity, and reserve. The quiet figures there take leave of one another with the same grace that their life had shown. There is none of the horror of darkness, none of the ugliness of dying; with calm faces and undisordered raiment they rise from their seats and take the last farewell. But the sepulchural verses show us more clearly how deep the grief was that lay beneath the quiet lines of the marble and the smooth cadence of the couplets. They cover and fill the whole range of emotion: household grief, and pain for the dead baby or the drowned lover, and the bitter parting of wife and husband, and the chill of distance and the doubt of the unknown nether world; and the thoughts of the bright and brief space of life, and the merciless continuity of nature, and the resolution of body and soul into the elements from which they came; and the uselessness of Death's impatience, and the bitter cry of a life gone like spilt water; and again, comfort out of the grave, perpetual placidity, "holy sleep," and earth's gratitude to her children, and beyond all, dimly and lightly drawn, the flowery meadows of Persephone, the great simplicity and rest of the other world, and far away a shadowy and beautiful country to which later men were to give the name of Heaven.
The famous sepulchral epigrams of Simonides deserve a word to themselves; for in them, among the most finished achievements of the greatest period of Greece, the art not only touches its highest recorded point, but a point beyond which it seems inconceivable that art should go. They stand with the odes of Pindar and the tragedies of Sophocles as the symbols of perfection in literature; not only from the faultlessness of their form, but from their greatness of spirit, the noble and simple thought that had then newly found itself so perfect a language to commemorate the great deeds which it inspired. Foremost among them are those on the men whose fame they can hardly exalt beyond the place given them by history; on the three hundred of Thermopylae, the Athenian dead at Marathon, the Athenian and Lacedaemonian dead at Plataea.[2] "O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here obeying their orders"—the words have grown so famous that it is only by sudden flashes that we can appreciate their greatness. No less noble are others somewhat less widely known: on the monument erected by the city of Corinth to the men who, when all Greece stood as near destruction as a knife's edge, helped to win her freedom at Salamis; on the Athenians, slain under the skirts of the Euboean hills, who lavished their young and beautiful lives for Athens; on the soldiers who fell, in the full tide of the Greek glory, at the great victory of the Eurymedon.[3] In all the epitaphs of this class the thought of the city swallows up individual feeling; for the city's sake, that she may be free and great, men offer their death as freely as their life; and the noblest end for a life spent in her service is to die in the moment of her victory. The funeral speech of Pericles dwells with all the amplitude of rhetoric on the glory of such a death; "having died they are not dead" are the simpler words of Simonides.[4]
Not less striking than these in their high simplicity are his epitaphs on private persons: that which preserves the fame of the great lady who was not lifted up to pride, Archedice daughter of Hippias; that on Theognis of Sinope, so piercing and yet so consoling in its quiet pathos, or that on Brotachus of Gortyn, the trader who came after merchandise and found death; the dying words of Timomachus and the eternal memory left to his father day by day of the goodness and wisdom of his dead child; the noble apostrophe to mount Gerania, where the drowned and nameless sailor met his doom, the first and one of the most magnificent of the long roll of poems on seafarers lost at sea.[5] In all of them the foremost quality is their simplicity of statement. There are no superlatives. The emotion is kept strictly in the background, neither expressed nor denied. Great minds of later ages sought a justification of the ways of death in denying that it brought any reasonable grief. To the cold and profound thought of Marcus Aurelius death is "a natural thing, like roses in spring or harvest in autumn."[6] But these are the words of a strange language. The feeling of Simonides is not, like theirs, abstract and remote; he offers no justification, because none is felt to be needed where the pain of death is absorbed in the ardour of life.
That great period passed away; and in those which follow it, the sepulchural inscription, while it retains the old simplicity, descends from those heights into more common feelings, lets loose emotion, even dallies with the ornaments of grief. The sorrow of death is spoken of freely; nor is there any poetry more pathetic than those epitaphs which, lovely in their sadness, commemorate the lost child, the sundered lovers, the disunited life. Among the most beautiful are those on children: on the baby that just lived, and, liking it not, went away again before it had known good or evil;[7] on the children of a house all struck down in one day and buried in one grave;[8] on the boy whom his parents could not keep, though they held both his little hands in theirs, led downward by the Angel of Death to the unsmiling land.[9] Then follows the keener sadness of the young life, spared till it opened into flower only to be cut down before noon; the girl who, sickening for her baby-brother, lost care for her playmates, and found no peace till she went to rejoin him;[10] the boy of twelve, with whom his father, adding no words of lamentation, lays his whole hope in the grave;[11] the cry of the mourning mother over her son, Bianor or Anticles, an only child laid on the funeral pyre before an only parent's eyes, leaving dawn thenceforth disadorned of her sweetness, and no comfort in the sun.[12] More piercing still in their sad sweetness are the epitaphs on young wives; on Anastasia, dead at sixteen, in the first year of her marriage, over whom the ferryman of the dead must needs mingle his own with her father's and her husband's tears; on Atthis of Cnidos, the wife who had never left her husband till this the first and last sundering came; on Paulina of Ravenna, holy of life and blameless, the young bride of the physician whose skill could not save her, but whose last testimony to her virtues has survived the wreck of the centuries that have made the city crumble and the very sea retire.[13] The tender feeling for children mingles with the bitter grief at their loss, a touch of fancy, as though they were flowers plucked by Persephone to be worn by her and light up the greyness of the underworld. Cleodicus, dead before the festival of this third birthday, when the child's hair was cut and he became a boy, lies in his little coffin; but somewhere by unknown Acheron a shadow of him grows fair and strong in youth, though he never may return to earth again.[14]