slight and fugitive pieces, for so broad and sustained a view of life.
But what we do find in the Anthology is the reflection in many
epigrams of many partial criticisms from within; the expression, in
the most brief and pointed form, of the total effect that life had on
one man or another at certain moments, whether in the heat of blood,
or the first melancholy of youth, or the graver regard of mature
years. In nearly all the same sad note recurs, of the shortness of
life, of the inevitableness of death. Now death is the shadow at the
feast, bidding men make haste to drink before the cup is snatched from
their lips with its sweetness yet undrained; again it is the
bitterness within the cup itself, the lump of salt dissolving in the
honeyed wine and spoiling the drink. Then comes the revolt against the
cruel law of Nature in the crude thought of undisciplined minds.
Sometimes this results in hard cynicism, sometimes in the relaxation
of all effort; now and then the bitterness grows so deep that it
almost takes the quality of a real philosophy, a nihilism, to use the
barbarous term of our own day, that declares itself as a positive
solution of the whole problem. "Little is the life of our rejoicing,"
cries Rufinus,[1] in the very words of an English ballad of the
fifteenth century; "old age comes quickly, and death ends all." In
many epigrams this burden is repeated. The philosophy is that of
Ecclesiastes: "Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine
with a merry heart, let thy garments be always white, and let thy head
lack no ointment; see life with the wife whom thou lovest all the days
of the life of thy vanity; for that is thy portion in life, and in thy
labour which thou takest under the sun." If the irony here is
unintentional it is all the bitterer; such consolation leads surely to
a more profound gloom. With a selfish nature this view of life becomes
degraded into cynical effrontery; under the Roman empire the lowest
corruption of "good manners" took for its motto the famous words,