LYCOPHRON.--Lycophron also belongs to this period. He left such an
admirable poem (_Alexandra_, that is Cassandra) that his
contemporaries themselves failed to understand it in spite of all their
efforts. He is the head and ancestor of that great school of inaccessible
or impenetrable poets who are most ardently admired. Maurice Sceve in the
sixteenth century is the illustrious example.

THE EPIGRAMMATISTS: MELEAGER.--To these numerous men of great talent must
be added the epigrammatists--that is, those who wrote very short, very
concise, very limpid poems wherein they sought absolute perfection. They
were almost innumerable. The most illustrious was Meleager, in whom we
can yet appreciate delicate genius and exquisite sensibility.

POLYBIUS.--Reduced to Roman provinces (successively greater Greece,
Greece proper, Egypt, Syria), the Grecian world none the less continued
to be an admirable intellectual haven. As early as the Punic wars, the
Greek Polybius revealed he was an excellent historian, military,
political, and philosophical, inquisitive about facts, inquisitive, too,
about probable causes, constitutions, and social institutions, the
morals, character, and the underlying temperament of races. His principal
work is the _Histories_--that is, the history of the Graeco-Roman
world from the second Punic war until the capture of Corinth by the
Romans. He was an intellectual master; unfortunately he wrote very badly.

EPICTETUS; MARCUS AURELIUS.--It must, however, be recognised that in the
first century before Christ and in the first after, Greece--even
intellectually--was in a state of depression. But dating from the Emperor
Nerva--that is, from the commencement of the second century--there was a
remarkable Hellenic revival. Primarily, it was the most brilliant moment