Out of these Lives of Philosophers, this Table-Talk of Athenæus, these Attic Nights, and this Florilegium of satire and wit, the Anthology, what sort of sum-total does the harvestman gather in? But unless by a strange accident the best specimens of the Greek Muse in the present direction or department have unexceptionally disappeared, these must have constituted the staple material with which the Athenian Club of the Sixty amused themselves and their correspondents.
The story about Philip and his connection with this body perhaps sets the father of Alexander before some of us in a rather new light, and in a more favourable one than other anecdotes which are associated with his name. By the way, that where the poor woman is made to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, strikes us as having more than a jocular value—as betokening the primitive condition of judicial forms in Macedon at that period.
It forms by no means the least singular of survivals that the names of several of the members of the Sixty Club have been preserved—just a tenth, including that of one who was nicknamed the Lobster. The Sixty were to Athenian society what the Literary Club was to London in the days of Reynolds and Johnson—possibly more; for it was a greater novelty and a fresher influence. But the Literary Club itself was far more than the successor of other institutions, of which earlier men, like Beaumont and Dryden, Addison and Steele, had been the ornament and the life.
The modern manner of epigrammatic wit may be intrinsically similar to that of the Greeks, but certainly diverges from it widely enough in point of detail and colour. I am only at present, however, dealing with the principia of the subject, and shewing, as well as I can, to what extent the ancients laid the foundations of the wealth in this branch of culture of which we find ourselves the possessors.
But the strong influence of local atmosphere and idiom is illustrated by that epigram of Burns to Mr. Ferguson:—
“The king’s poor blackguard slave am I,
And scarce dare spare a minute;
But I’ll be wi’ you by-and-by,
Or else the devil’s in it;”
which strikes both sides of the Tweed as intelligible and clever, but would have fallen as flatly on the ear of a Greek as some of the traditional sayings in Athenæus, at which the Sixty would have clapped their hands, do on that of a modern Englishman.