together with their shortness, they offer an almost irresistible temptation to every one who has any knack of rhyming and a taste for small literary ventures. But they are not so easy to imitate as they appear. For the best of them are not only finished and compact, but also remarkable for a total absence of ornament, so that even Shelley's rendering, which has just been quoted, seems to lack the chastened and almost austere purity of the original, while Dr Grundy, whose version is as follows: 'Erstwhile the star of dawn, thy light on living men was shed; But now in death an evening star, thou'rt light among the dead,' shows how hard it is to adopt the most simple style,' and adhere 'as closely as possible to literal translation' without at least some loss of distinction and poetic quality. But a good Greek epigram, however undecorated, never ceases to be poetry and a work of art. Even the inscription over the Spartans who fell at Thermopyla is not, for all its plainness, what a Roman inscription would be, merely monumental. It is not merely powerful, but it also pleases. It stirs the heart, but it also touches the artistic sense, and one lingers over the last four words τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι—as over something that delights because it cannot be bettered. Art has here reached its highest by complete self-effacement; and just as, in spite of unnumbered attempts, this particular epigram has never been successfully rendered, so, if all others were equally severe in their beauty, the translator might well despair. But happily for them even Simonides relaxes, and in this epigram the art' is apparent : Εἰ τὸ καλῶς θνήσκειν ἀρετῆς μέρος ἐστι μέγιστον, Ελλάδι γὰρ σπεύδοντες ἐλευθερίαν περιθεῖναι κείμεθ ̓ ἀγηράντῳ χρώμενοι εὐλογία, 6 and Mr Headlam, seizing the opportunity, is not unequal to it: 'If the best merit be to lose life well, To us beyond all else that fortune came: while if any one wishes to contrast true art with tricky art, let him contrast the Thermopylæ epigram with the second couplet of another by the same author, 'On those who fell at the Eurymedon': ἀντὶ δ ̓ ἀκοντοδόκων ἀνδρῶν μνημεῖα θανόντων ἄψυχ ̓ εὐψύχων ἅδε κέκευθε κόνις. 'No one,' writes Dr Grundy, 'has yet succeeded in reproducing these lines.' And it may well be so, for there is nothing in them but an artificial play on the words 'spirit-less' (i.e. dead) and 'spirited,' which even if it could be reproduced' would not be worth the effort. To enter, however, on a discussion of epigrams and their translation would be to take up, at the end of an article, a long task, and also one which is here superfluous. For the subject has been treated some four years back (July 1911) by Dr Grundy in this Review, and moreover it is one in which there are as many judgments as men.' If there are no fixed laws according to which translations should be judged-and every writer on the subject must feel that he is at best 'tamquam bombyx bombyzans in vacuo'-most certainly there is no rule by which sentence can be passed upon an epigram. Each rendering has to be judged on its own merits; it has to hit its own mark, and the final test of success is that it should please, that the reader should say, 'That is how I should have put it myself.' But, to enable a reader to do this, the text should go with the rendering; and it is a defect of Dr Grundy's excellent collection that, whereas he gives a whole page to each tiny version, he has not added the original. For the Anthologia Græca is not in every one's hands; and, since an epigram is chiefly a piece of literary cleverness, not having the text we lose the pleasure that comes from a sort of artistic competition. Here, for instance, is a bit by Lucilius: Ἤ τὸ φιλεῖν περίγραψον, Ἔρως, ὅλον, ἢ τὸ φιλεῖσθαι and here it is rendered by R. Garnett: 'Eros, I pray thee to remove Surely it is a pleasure-is it not?-to sit, as it were, in judgment and then award the palm to the translator. But, if Dr Grundy grudges us this added delight, many at least of the pieces which he has brought together will delight every one sufficiently by themselves, while, after all, criticism is a poor thing and it is better simply to admire and enjoy such work as this: ON THE STATUE OF OLYMPIAN JOVE. 'Did Jove descend, and thus unveil His form before the sculptor's eyes? Or Pheidias' self Olympus scale To view the monarch of the skies?' Or this, which is from Dionysius, but might have been Heine's: 'Hail, thou who hast the roses, thou hast the rose's grace! But sellest thou the roses, or e'en thine own fair face?' or finally this 'Epitaph' by Paulus Silentiarius : 'My name and country were-no matter what! Now here I lie-and no one cares a jot!' T. E. PAGE Art. 2.-ITALY AND THE ADRIATIC. 1. Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium. Agram: Academia Scientiarum et Artium. 2. The Republic of Ragusa. By Luigi Villari. London: Dent, 1904. 3. Oesterreich-Ungarn und Italien. By Leopold, Freiherr von Chlumecky. Leipzig and Vienna: Deuticke, 1907. 4. The Hapsburg Monarchy. By Henry Wickham Steed. London: Constable, 1914. 5. La Monarchia degli Absburgo. By Alessandro Dudan. Rome: Bontempelli, 1914. 6. L'Italia d'oltre confine. By Virginio Gayda. Turin: Bocca, 1914. 7. L'Adriatico. By * Milan Treves, 1914. 8. Il Mare adriatico; sua funzione attraverso i tempi. By Gellio Cassi. Milan: Hoepli, 1915. And other works. THE present war has brought the Adriatic Sea and the various problems connected with it once more into public notice. A long arm of the Mediterranean, piercing its way almost into the heart of Central Europe, the Adriatic divides the Italian from the Balkan peninsula, taps the rich inland districts both south and north of the Alps, and provides a valuable waterway for the trade of Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland with the Near and Middle East and the Mediterranean basin. Many races have dwelt on its shores and fought for the mastery of its waters; and to-day, after a period of peace, several nations are again struggling for the control of this sea and the traffic to which it gives life-old nations with great traditions and young nations full of ambitious dreams of future greatness. The character and general conditions of the two shores are very different. The western coast is an almost uniform line of sandy beach with broad stretches of shallows, broken at only two points-the promontory of Ancona and that of the Gargano-and with few natural harbours. At the northern and southern ends are wide plains spreading far inland before they reach mountain barriers, whereas in the middle section the rugged Apennines are always near the sea and sometimes reach its shores. At the head of the gulf is a flat marshy district formed by the alluvial deltas of many rivers flowing down from the Alps. The eastern coast, on the other hand, is indented and cut up into innumerable bays and inlets, some as deep as Norwegian fjords and others so large as almost to form inland seas, while a chain, in many points a series of chains, of rocky islands runs parallel to the mainland from the southernmost point of Istria to Ragusa. Steep, stony mountains reach down to the water's edge almost the whole way and rise up again on the islands. The soil is not very fertile, for the Karst formation is bare and stony; the cypress, the olive, the vine and patches of juniper, never in large quantities, are often the only relief to long stretches of sterile coast. But in a few favoured spots there are tracts of good land, and especially in southern Dalmatia the climate is mild and the vegetation luxuriant and semi-tropical. Inland the stony Karst belt stretches wide, but beyond are broad fertile plains watered by mighty rivers, lands whose peoples have for ever been striving to reach the sea. Yet, in spite of these differences there is, even geographically, a connexion between the two shores, for both the Apennines and the Karst are offshoots of the Alps; and Dalmatia has, as Edward Freeman wrote, 'not a little the air of a thread, a finger, a branch cast off from the western peninsula.' Historically the connexion is even closer. The eastern shore throughout the ages has received its civilisation from the west; and its periods of greatest prosperity have been those during which it was under the rule of a western Government, whereas from the east it received hordes of barbarians who came to devastate and destroy. Only in quite recent times have there been peoples coming down to the Adriatic from the east endowed with civilisation, albeit inferior to that of the west. The Greeks created a chain of colonies on the Apulian coast, but occupied only a few points along the eastern shore and some islands, such as Melitta (Meleda), Bracchya (Brazza), Issa (Lissa), Kerkyra Melaina (Curzola), Tragyrion (Traù), Epidauron (Ragusa Vecchia), and in Albania Epidamnos (Alessio) and a few other places. But they never settled there as they did in |