freedom. But it is in the Alexandrian period that the epigram of love
flowers out; and it is at the end of that period, where the Greek
spirit was touched by Oriental passion, that it culminates in
Meleager.

We possess about a hundred amatory epigrams by this poet. Inferior
perhaps in clearness of outline and depth of insight to those of the
Alexandrian poet Asclepiades, they are unequalled in the width of
range, the profusion of imagination, the subtlety of emotion with
which they sound the whole lyre of passion. Meleager was born in a
Syrian town and educated at Tyre in the last age of the Seleucid
empire; and though he writes Greek with perfect mastery, it becomes in
his hands almost a new language, full of dreams, at once more languid
and more passionate. It was the fashion among Alexandrian poets to
experiment in language; and Callimachus had in this way brought the
epigram to the most elaborate jewel-finish; but in the work of
Callimachus and his contemporaries the pure Greek tradition still
survives. In Meleager, the touch of Asiatic blood creates a new type,
delicate, exotic, fantastic. Art is no longer restrained and severe.
The exquisite austerity of Greek poetry did not outlive the greatness
of Athens; its perfect clearness of outline still survived in
Theocritus; here both are gone. The atmosphere is loaded with a steam
of perfumes, and with still unimpaired ease and perfection of hand
there has come in a strain of the quality which of all qualities is
the most remote from the Greek spirit, mysticism. Some of Meleager's
epigrams are direct and simple, even to coarseness; but in all the
best and most characteristic there is this vital difference from
purely Greek art, that love has become a religion; the spirit of the
East has touched them. It is this that makes Meleager so curiously
akin to the medieval poets. Many of his turns of thought, many even of