s unknown traveler's verse,
scrawled with a stylus, still thrills, still rings, as the statue still
sounds its ancient note.

In this long succession of short poems is delineated the Greek
character, not of Athens but of the whole circle of the Mediterranean.
The sphered life of the race is in its subjects. Each great Greek
victory has its epigrams. In them, statues have an immortal life denied
to marble and to bronze. The critical admiration of the Hellene for his
great men of letters stands recorded here; his early love for the heroes
of his brief-lived freedom, and his sedulous flattery of the Roman lords
of his slavery. Here too is his domestic life, its joy and its sorrow.
In this epigram, the maid dedicates her dolls to Artemis; and in that,
the mother, mother and priestess both, lays down a life overflowing in
good deeds and fruited with honorable offspring. The splendid side of
Greek life is painted elsewhere. Here is its homely simplicity. The
fisher again spreads his nets and the sailor his peaked lateen sail. The
hunter sets his snares and tracks his game in the light snow. The caged
partridge stretches its weary wings in its cage, and the cat has for it
a modern appetite. Men gibe and jest. They see how hollow life is, and
also how truth rings true. Love is here, sacred and revered, in forms
pure and holy; and not less, that foul pool decked with beauty in which
Greek manhood lost its masculine virtue.

Half a century before Christ, when Greek life overspread the eastern
Mediterranean, and in every market-place Greek was the tongue of trade,
of learning, and of gentle breeding, Greek letters grew conscious of its
own riches. For six centuries and more, or as long as separates us from
Chaucer, men had been writing these brief epigrams. The first had the
brevity of Simonides, the next Alexandrian luxuriance. Many were carved
by those who wrote much; more by those who composed but two or three. In
Syrian Gadara there dwelt a Greek, Meleager, whose poetry is the very
flower of fervent Greek verse. Yet so near did he live to the great
change which was to overturn the gods he loved, and substitute morality
for beauty as the mainspring of life, that some who knew him must also,
a brief span of years later, have known Jesus the Christ. Meleager was
the first who gathered Greek epigrams in an Anthology, prefacing it with
such apt critical utterance as has been the despair of all critics
called since to weigh verse i