bewildered in the rainy night, with the lights of the banquet still
flaring in their eyes, stumbled on the slippery hill-path and lay dead
at the foot of the cliff.[37]

/O Charides, what is there beneath?/ cries a passer-by over the grave
of one who had in life nursed his hopes on the doctrine of Pythagoras;
and out of the grave comes the sombre answer, /Great darkness/.[38] It
is in this feeling that the brooding over death in later Greek
literature issues; under the Roman empire we feel that we have left
the ancient world and are on the brink of the Middle Ages with their
half hysterical feeling about death, the piteous and ineffectual
revolt against it, and the malign fascination with which it preys on
men's minds and paralyses their action. To the sombre imagination of
an exhausted race the generations of mankind were like bands of
victims dragged one after another to the slaughter-house; in Palladas
and his contemporaries the medieval dance of death is begun.[39] The
great and simple view of death is wholly broken up, with the usual
loss and gain that comes of analysis. On the one hand is developed
this tremulous and cowardly shrinking from the law of nature. But on
the other there arises in compensation the view of death as final
peace, the release from trouble, the end of wandering, the resolution
of the feverous life of man into the placid and continuous life of
nature. With a great loss of strength and directness comes an
increased measure of gentleness and humanity. Poetry loves to linger
over the thought of peaceful graves. The dead boy's resting-place by
the spring under the poplars bids the weary wayfarer turn aside and
drink in the shade, and remember the quiet place when he is far
away.[40] The aged gardener lies at peace under the land that he had
laboured for many a year, and in recompence of his fruitful toil over
vine and olive, corn-field and orchard-plot, grateful earth lies