emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of loveliness; and the bitter
laugh over the empty casket of Pandora[8] comes from a heart wrung
with the sorrow that beauty is less strong than time. Nor is the
burden of these poems only that pleasant things decay; rather that in
nothing good or bad, rich or mean, is there permanence or certitude,
but everywhere and without selection Time feeds oblivion with decay of
things. All things flow and nothing abides; shape and name, nature and
fortune yield to the dissolving touch of time.[9]

Even then the world was old. The lamentations over decayed towns and
perished empires remind us that the distance which separates the age
of the Caesars from our own is in relation to human history merely a
chapter somewhere in the middle of a great volume. Then, no less than
now, men trod daily over the ruins of old civilisations and the
monuments of lost races. One of the most striking groups of poems in
the Anthology is the long roll of the burdens of dead cities; Troy,
Delos, Mycenae, Argos, Amphipolis, Corinth, Sparta.[10] The
depopulation of Greece brought with it a foreshadowing of the wreck of
the whole ancient world. With the very framework of human life giving
way daily before their eyes, men grew apt to give up the game. The
very instability of all things, once established as a law, brought a
sort of rest and permanence with it; "there is nothing strictly
immutable," they might have said, "but mutability." Thus the law of
change became a permanent thread in mortal affairs, and, with the
knowledge that all the old round would be gone over again by others,
grew the sense that in the acceptance of this law of nature there was
involved a conquest of nature, an overcoming of the world.

For the strength of Fate was not otherwise to be contended with, and
its grim irony went deeper than human reach. Nemesis was merciless; an