in the same play,[11] where Sophocles is dealing with a subject that
he really cares about, it sounds almost artificial. And in Euripides,
psychology occupies the whole of the interest that is not already
preoccupied by logic and rhetoric; these were the arts of life, and
with these serious writing dealt; with the heroism of Macaria, even
with the devotion of Alcestis, personal passion has but little to do.

With the immense expansion of the Greek world that followed the
political extinction of Greece Proper, there came a relaxation of this
tension. Feeling grew humaner; social and family life reassumed their
real importance; and gradually there grew up a thing till then unknown
in the world, and one the history of which yet remains to be written,
the romantic spirit. Pastoral poetry, with its passionate sense of
beauty in nature, reacted on the sense of beauty in simple human life.
The Idyls of Theocritus are full of a new freshness of feeling: {epei
k esores tas parthenos oia gelanti}[12]--this is as alien from the
Athenian spirit as it approaches the feeling of a medieval romance-
writer: and in the Pharmaceutriae pure passion, but passion softened
into exquisite forms, is once more predominant.[13] It is in this age
then that we naturally find the most perfect examples of the epigram
of love. In the lyric period the epigram was still mainly confined to
its stricter sphere, that of inscriptions for tombs and dedicated
offerings: in the great Athenian age the direct treatment of love was
almost in abeyance. Just on the edge of this last period, as is usual
in a time of transition, there are exquisite premonitions of the new
art. The lovely hexameter fragment[14] preserved in the Anthology
under the name of Plato, and not unworthy of so great a parentage,
anticipates the manner and the cadences of Theocritus; and one or two
of the amatory epigrams that are probably Plato's might be Meleager's,
but for the severe perfection of language that died with Greek