Antiquity

Over the past month or so, I've been beguiled by the poems of The Greek Anthology.  Although the epigrammatic poems were written two thousand or so years ago, they do not have an out-of-date feel.  The local particulars may be ancient (the various gods of vales and groves and waters; classical landscapes; et cetera), but the human particulars have not changed.

No dust, no paltry marble for his grave
Has Erasippus, but the wide sea wave.
For with his ship he sank.  His bones decay --
But where, the cormorant alone can say.

Glaucus (translated by Goldwin Smith), in Henry Wellesley (editor), Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages, Chiefly from The Greek Anthology (1849), page 70.

"Full fathom five thy father lies;/Of his bones are coral made;/Those are pearls that were his eyes . . ."


John Addington Symonds writes:

"The Anthology may from some points of view be regarded as the most valuable relic of antique literature which we possess.  Composed of several thousand short poems, written for the most part in the elegiac metre, at different times and by a multitude of authors, it is coextensive with the whole current of Greek history, from the splendid period of the Persian war to the decadence of Christianized Byzantium.  Many subjects of interest in Greek life, which would otherwise have had to be laboriously illustrated from the historians or the comic poets, are here fully and melodiously set forth.
 . . . . . . . . . .
The slight effusions of these minor poets are even nearer to our hearts than the masterpieces of the noblest Greek literature.  They treat with a touching limpidity and sweetness of the joys and fears and hopes and sorrows that are common to all humanity.  They introduce us to the actual life of a bygone civilization, stripped of its political or religious accidents, and tell us that the Greeks of Athens or of Sidon thought and felt exactly as we feel.

John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, First Series (Second Edition, 1877), pages 356-357.


Full oft, of old, the islands changed their name,
And took new titles from some heir of fame:
Then dread not ye the wrath of gods above,
But change your own, and be the Isles of Love;
For "Love's" own name and shape the infant bore
Whom late we buried on your sandy shore . . .
Break softly there, thou never-weary wave,
And earth, lie light upon his little grave!

Crinagoras (translated by John William Burgon), in Anthologia Polyglotta, page 239.


It is refreshing to encounter human beings who are but little infected with our contemporary ironic know-it-allness, our obtuse and unironic self-regard.  They are seemly; we are unseemly in comparison.

This stone, beloved Sabinus, on thy grave
     Memorial small of our great love shall be.
I still shall seek thee lost; from Lethe's wave
     Oh! drink not thou forgetfulness -- of me.

Anonymous (translated by Goldwin Smith), in Anthologia Polyglotta, page 107.