inscription in commendation of the water of the Thracian river Tearos,
engraved on a pillar by Darius, transcribed from Herodotus, iv. 91.
The odd thing is that the collector of the Anthology appears to have
thought it was in verse. The Hortatory section includes a score of
hexameter and iambic fragments, some of them proverbial lines, others
extracts from the tragedians. The Convivial section has five-and-
twenty in hexameter, iambic, and hemiambic, out of four hundred and
forty-two. The Musa Stratonis, in which the hand of the Byzantine
editor has had a less free play, is entirely in elegiac. But the short
appendix next following it in the Palatine MS. consists entirely of
epigrams in various metres, chiefly composite. Of the two thousand
eight hundred and thirteen epigrams which constitute the Palatine
Anthology proper, (sections V., VI., VII., IX., X., and XI.), there
are in all a hundred and seventy-five in hexameter, seventy-seven in
iambic, and twenty-two in various other metres. In practise, when one
comes to make a selection, the exclusion of all non-elegiac pieces
leads to no difficulty.

Nothing illustrates more vividly the essential unity and continuous
life of Greek literature than this line of poetry, reaching from the
period of the earliest certain historical records down to a time when
modern poetry in the West of Europe had already established itself;
nothing could supply a better and simpler corrective to the fallacy,
still too common, that Greek history ends with the conquests of
Alexander. It is on some such golden bridge that we must cross the
profound gulf which separates, to the popular view, the sunset of the
Western Empire of Rome from the dawn of the Italian republics and the
kingdoms of France and England. That gulf to most persons seems
impassable, and it is another world which lies across it. But here one
sees how that distant and strange world stretches out its hands to