he was writing at any given time.

[Footnote 181: Ed. Reifferscheid. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1884.]

[Footnote 182: Following Eustathius in Hercher, _op. cit._]

[Footnote 183: These political verses are fifteen-syllabled, with a
caesura at the eighth, and in a rhythm ostensibly accentual.]

[Footnote 184: _Erotici Scriptores_, ii. 555.]

[Sidenote: Hysminias and Hysmine.]

[Sidenote: _Its style._]

But _Hysminias and Hysmine_[185] has interests of character which
distinguish its author and itself, not merely from the herd of
chroniclers and commentators who make up the bulk of Byzantine
literature so-called, but even from such more respectable but somewhat
featureless work as Anna Comnena's. It is not a good book; but it is
by no means so extremely bad as the traditional judgment (not always,
perhaps, based on or buttressed by direct acquaintance with the
original) is wont to give out. On one at least of the sides of this
interest it is quite useless to read it except in the original, for
the attraction is one of style. Neither Lyly nor any of our late
nineteenth-century "stylists" has outgone, perhaps none has touched,
Eustathius in euphuism. It is needless to say that while the
simplicity of the best Greek style usually prefers the most direct and
natural order, its suppleness lends itself to almost any gymnastic,
and its lucidity prevents total confusion from arising. Eustathius has
availed himself of these opportunities for "raising his mother tongue
to a higher power" to the very utmost. No translation can do justice
to the elaborate foppery of even the first sentence,[186] with its
coquetry of arrangement, its tormented structure of phrase, its
jingle of sound-repetition, its desperate rejection of simplicity in
every shape and form. To describe precisely the means resorted to
would take a chapter at least. They are astonishingly modern--the
present tense, the use of catchwords like [Greek: holos], the
repetitions and jingles above referred to. Excessively elaborate
description of word-painting, though modern too, can hardly be said to
be a novelty: it had distinguished most of the earlier Greek
novelists, especially Achilles Tatius. But there is something in the
descriptions of _Hysminias and Hysmine_ more mediaeval than those of
Achilles, more like the _Romance of the Rose_, to which, indeed, there
is a curious resemblance of atmosphere in the book. Triplets of
epithet--"a man athirst, and parched, and boilin