"Charidas, what's the world below?" "Black darkness, that is all."

"Do they return who thither go?" "Who says so liar call!

We pass to nothingness; of truth that is the very pith." "But Pluto's self!" "Why, Pluto's self is nothing but a myth."'

The dialogue is usually supposed, as in this instance, to take place between the wayfarer and the corpse in the grave. But sometimes the tale of the dead is taken up by some animal carved on the tomb, it may be a lion on the grave of some Leonidas, an eagle on the tomb of a poet, or a dog on the tomb of a cynic philosopher. There is the celebrated epitaph on Diogenes by an unknown writer, beginning eiπè Kúov. . . . Dr Symonds took it seriously:

"Tell me, good dog, whose tomb you guard so well?”
"The Cynic's." "True: but who that cynic, tell.”
"Diogenes, of fair Sinope's race."

"What? He that in a tub was wont to dwell?"
"Yes, but the stars are now his dwelling-place."'

An impious cynicism may suggest that the writer of the epitaph meant to be cynical to the cynic; and that his true intent was to treat the subject somewhat lightly:

"Since, O dog, this grave thou guardest, tell me whose the grave may be."

"'Tis a Cynic's, that's to say, Sir, just another dog like me." "What's his name?" "Diogenes, Sir; he who from Sinope came."

"He who lived inside a barrel?" "Yes, indeed, Sir, 'tis the

same.

But he now, since his translation,
Lives inside a constellation."

The other tendency of philosophy was to lead men to fairer hopes, above all to the belief that the good was immortal. Even Callimachus gives expression to it in his epitaph on Saon of Acanthus, thus turned by Symonds:

'Here lapped in hallowed slumber Saon lies,
Asleep, not dead; a good man never dies.'

* This translation, and those of the epitaphs on Saon and on Proté, below, are by Dr Symonds, father of the better-known J. A. Symonds.

But never was a fair hope of the future more beautifully expressed in antiquity than in the epitaph on Proté, the translation of which by Dr Symonds, and quoted by his son J. A. Symonds in his work on the Greek poets, is perhaps the finest extant version in English of any of the verses from the Anthology.

'Thou art not dead, my Proté! thou art flown
To a far country better than our own;
Thy home is now an Island of the Blest;
There 'mid Elysian meadows take thy rest;
Or lightly trip along the flowery glade,
Rich with the asphodels that never fade!
Nor pain, nor cold, nor toil, shall vex thee more,
Nor thirst, nor hunger on that happy shore;
Nor longings vain (now that blest life is won)
For such poor days as mortals here drag on;
To thee for aye a blameless life is given

In the pure light of ever-present Heaven.'

The intellectual world of ancient times does not appear to have believed in anything resembling Hell; for, had it done so, it could hardly have failed to consign its pet aversions to it. It was left to Christianity to enlarge the scope of eternity. Rest is the reward, and a lack of rest the punishment, in the hereafter.

Another note is touched when we pass to the literary epitaphs, meaning thereby those posthumous judgments on the great men of the past which were never intended for the tombs of those whose virtues and whose defects they record. As a storehouse of literary appreciation in excelsis they are unsurpassed; and, moreover, they contain some of the most beautiful pieces in the whole collection. It is almost invidious to make a choice among the greatest of them, but perhaps that on Sophocles by Simmias of Rhodes, a writer of the third century before Christ, is most remarkable for its beauty. If it be necessary to recall it, its first line will recall it to many.

6

• Ἠρέμ ̓ ὑπὲρ τύμβοιο Σοφοκλέος, ἠρέμα, κισσέ.

The last two lines of it render it all but untranslatable into English verse. Only one English writer, Dr A. J. Butler, has succeeded in producing a version unmarred by some weak line or expression.

'Lightly, lightly climb, O ivy, o'er the tomb of Sophocles; Lightly let thy dewy tresses stream before it to the ground;

Round about let roses blossom and the cluster-laden trees Shed abroad their wavy tendrils, circling like a flood around,

For the wonder-hearted wisdom of his honeyed melodies, Which the Muses and the Graces with their mingled bounties crowned.'

William Cory's version of Callimachus' epitaph on Heracleitus is one of the most beautiful in our language; but who does not know those lines beginning:

'They told me, Heracleitus, they told me you were dead; They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed...'?

Tom Moore's paraphrase of the lines on Anacreon by Antipater of Sidon is full of poetry. But the mere quotation of the best literary epitaphs would take too much space. One great writer, Meleager, wrote his own -nay, he wrote two for himself. They are both distinguished by the half-pathetic humour which is so customary with him. The old man could never quite forgive a Providence which had decreed that he should be born in Gadara-though it was not as yet famous for its swine outside the limits of Hellas:

'A Syrian I? The world's own fatherland.
So marvel not! Forget not, stranger, that
Confusion's self all mortal men begat!'

This is from one of his two epitaphs. And the same regretful longing appears in the quaint pathos of the last lines of the other, where he supposes himself to be addressing from his tomb a passer-by:

'If thou'rt a Syrian, Sir, "Salaam" to you!

Or, if Phoenician, I say "Adieu"!

But, if it happen that a Greek thou be,

I say "Farewell." Ah! say the same to me!'

These are, as it were, the last words of a man who had spent his life in writing the most beautiful love-poems in existence. Had he not himself said;

'It may be in the years to come
That men who love shall think of me,
And reading o'er these verses see
How love was my life's martyrdom.

Love-songs I write for him and her,

Now this, now that, as Love dictates;
One birthday gift alone the Fates

Gave me, to be Love's scrivener.'-J. A. Symonds.

Meleager is not merely the greatest love-poet; he is also one of the most humorous of writers. His is an Aristophanic humour which likes to take the reader along a high flight of almost tragic fancy, only to let him down with a sudden fall at the end:

'She is stolen! Who is there

That could do a deed so cruel?
Who 'gainst very Love would dare
Raise a hand in deadly duel?

Light the links-be quick about it!
Hist! What footfall made me start?
Heliodora's-who can doubt it?

Back into my breast, O heart!'-Rouse.

Quaint as is his humour, lightly as he sometimes treats the passion of love and the forlorn victim of it, Meleager was one who felt the passion deeply. His lines on the death of Heliodora express a feeling as beautiful and as sincere as the poem itself. He depicted the Sturm und Drang of a strong physical life dominated by a sense of beauty; and the picture is true alike to nature and to art. He is without a predecessor and without a successor in literature. Nearest to him as a love-poet comes the Byzantine, Paulus Silentiarius. His spirit is more modern than that of Meleager, the creation of a world in which passion has been cooled by age. Yet it is passionate enough as the times go, and, at its best, is full of genuine sentiment and bright fancies.

The poems disclose in a very remarkable way both the keenness and the limitation of the Greek sense of beauty. To beauty existent in the human form the Greek was, needless to say, peculiarly sensitive. He was also peculiarly sensitive to the defects of ugliness. It is when we turn to the beauties of the inanimate world

that his appreciation is most difficult to analyse. Very diverse opinions have been expressed on the subject by scholars of long and intimate acquaintance with Greek literature. The testimony of the Anthology is, by itself, fairly clear; but, if it be cited, it must be put forward not as decisive on the question, but as merely contributory to it.

In these poems the sense and appreciation of the beauty of flowers is strongly contrasted with the absence of any expressed appreciation of the beauty of scenery. It is not merely in the 'Garland' of Meleager that the love of flowers is shown; it is displayed again and again by poets of all the ages of this millennium of verse. It is their colour, their scent, and their symmetry of form which seem to appeal especially to the feelings of the Greek. Scenery, in the sense in which we use it, leaves him, if not cold, at any rate expressionless. There are passages which seem at first reading to show such appreciation; above all the numerous verses, some of which are without doubt copies of actual inscriptions, which refer to some delightful resting-place near a spring beside the road, or to the plane-tree or the pine high on the hillside where the shepherd's pipe may be heard. The verse of Anyté is typical of the feeling expressed :

'Stranger, beneath this rock thy limbs bestow

Sweet, 'mid the green leaves, breezes whisper hers
Drink the cool wave, while noontide fervours glow

For such the rest to wearied pilgrim dear.'-Wellesley.

Even should the epigram refer to the beauty of the trees by the well, the idea uppermost in the mind of the writer is the bodily comfort to be derived from shade, from rest, and from the quenching of fierce thirst. Nor is it difficult for anyone who has passed a summer in the Nearer East to understand the gratitude of the wayfarer for this counterpart of the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. There is also a marked tendency to humanise the beauties of nature by a process of idealisation. The sunbeams which pierce the foliage are the wood-nymphs dancing through the forest; the waters which flash over the wheel are the water-nymphs turning the mill, as in the pretty fancy of Antipater: