they cannot stop there, and fix their interest on the shapeless
fragments of barbaric art beneath. But the Greek spirit and temper is
perhaps less known than it once was; there appears to be a real danger
that the influence upon men, the surprise of joy once given them by
the work of Sophocles or Pheidias or Plato, dwindles with the
accumulation of importance given to the barbarous antecedents and
surroundings from which that great art sprang. The highest office of
history is to preserve ideals; and where the ideal is saved its
substructure may well be allowed to perish, as perish in the main it
must, in spite of all that we can recover from the slight and
ambiguous records which it leaves. The value of this selection of
minor poetry--if one can speak of a value in poetry beyond itself--is
that, however imperfectly, it draws for us in little a picture of the
Greek ideal with all its virtues and its failings: it may be taken as
an epitome, slightly sketched with a facile hand, of the book of Greek
life. How slight the material is in which this picture is drawn
becomes plain the moment we turn from these epigrams, however delicate
and graceful, to the great writers. Yet the very study of the lesser
and the appreciation that comes of study may quicken our understanding
of the greater; and there is something more moving and pathetic in
their survival, as of flowers from a strange land: white violets
gathered in the morning, to recur to Meleager's exquisite metaphor,
yielding still a faint and fugitive fragrance here in the never-ending
afternoon.
----------

[1] Quoted by S. Paul, Eph. v. 14.

[2] Lucr. i. 263, iii. 967.