easily to ridicule from without, to jealousy and discontent from
within. The air rang with jeers at the portrait-painter who never got
a likeness, the too facile composer whose body was to be burned on a
pile of five-and-twenty chests all filled with his own scores, the bad
grammar of the grammarian, the supersubtle logic and the cumbrous
technical language of the metaphysician, the disastrous fertility of
the authors of machine-made epics.[6] The poor scholar had become
proverbial; living in a garret where the very mice were starved,
teaching the children of the middle classes for an uncertain pittance,
glad to buy a dinner with a dedication, and gradually petrifying in
the monotony of a thousand repetitions of stock passages and lectures
to empty benches.[7] Land and sea swarmed with penniless
grammarians.[8] The epigrams of Palladas of Alexandria bring before us
vividly the miseries of a schoolmaster. Those of Callimachus shew with
as painful clearness how the hatred of what was bad in literature
might end in embittering the whole nature.[9] Many epigrams are extant
which indicate that much of a scholar's life, even when he had not to
earn bitter bread on the stairs of patrons, was wasted in laborious
pedantry or in personal jealousies and recriminations.[10]

Of epigrams on individual works of art it is not necessary to say
much. Their numbers must have been enormous. The painted halls and
colonnades, common in all Greek towns, had their stories told in verse
below; there was hardly a statue or picture of any note that was not
the subject of a short poem. A collected series of works of art had
its corresponding series of epigrams. The Anthology includes, among
other lists, a description of nineteen subjects carved in relief on
the pedestals of the columns in a temple at Cyzicus, and another of
seventy-three bronze statues which stood in the great hall of a
gymnasium at Constantinople.[11] Any celebrated work like the Niobe of