Volume 2, Slice 2 Part 11 (2/2)

_Style and Value._--One of the princ.i.p.al claims of the Anthology to attention is derived from its continuity, its existence as a living and growing body of poetry throughout all the vicissitudes of Greek civilization. More ambitious descriptions of composition speedily ran their course, and having attained their complete development became extinct or at best lingered only in feeble or conventional imitations.

The humbler strains of the epigrammatic muse, on the other hand, remained ever fresh and animated, ever in intimate union with the spirit of the generation that gave them birth. To peruse the entire collection, accordingly, is as it were to a.s.sist at the disinterment of an ancient city, where generation has succeeded generation on the same site, and each stratum of soil enshrines the vestiges of a distinct epoch, but where all epochs, nevertheless, combine to const.i.tute an organic whole, and the transition from one to the other is hardly perceptible. Four stages may be indicated:--1. The h.e.l.lenic proper, of which Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-469 B.C.), the author of most of the sepulchral inscriptions on those who fell in the Persian wars, is the characteristic representative. This is characterized by a simple dignity of phrase, which to a modern taste almost verges upon baldness, by a crystalline transparency of diction, and by an absolute fidelity to the original conception of the epigram. Nearly all the pieces of this era are actual _bona fide_ inscriptions or addresses to real personages, whether living or deceased; narratives, literary exercises, and sports of fancy are exceedingly rare. 2. The epigram received a great development in its second or Alexandrian era, when its range was so extended as to include anecdote, satire, and amorous longing; when epitaphs and votive inscriptions were composed on imaginary persons and things, and men of taste successfully attempted the same subjects in mutual emulation, or sat down to compose verses as displays of their ingenuity. The result was a great gain in richness of style and general interest, counterbalanced by a falling off in purity of diction and sincerity of treatment. The modification--a perfectly legitimate one, the resources of the old style being exhausted--had its real source in the transformation of political life, but may be said to commence with and to find its best representative in the playful and elegant Leonidas of Tarentum, a contemporary of Pyrrhus, and to close with Antipater of Sidon, about 140 B.C. (or later). It should be noticed, however, that Callimachus, one of the most distinguished of the Alexandrian poets, affects the sternest simplicity in his epigrams, and copies the austerity of Simonides with as much success as an imitator can expect.

3. By a slight additional modification in the same direction, the Alexandrian pa.s.ses into what, for the sake of preserving the parallelism with eras of Greek prose literature, we may call the Roman style, although the peculiarities of its princ.i.p.al representative are decidedly Oriental. Meleager of Gadara was a Syrian; his taste was less severe, and his temperament more fervent than those of his Greek predecessors; his pieces are usually erotic, and their glowing imagery sometimes reminds us of the Song of Solomon. The luxuriance of his fancy occasionally betrays him into far-fetched conceits, and the lavishness of his epithets is only redeemed by their exquisite felicity. Yet his effusions are manifestly the offspring of genuine feeling, and his epitaph on himself indicates a great advance on the exclusiveness of antique Greek patriotism, and is perhaps the first clear enunciation of the spirit of universal humanity characteristic of the later Stoic philosophy. His gaiety and licentiousness are imitated and exaggerated by his somewhat later contemporary, the Epicurean Philodemus, perhaps the liveliest of all the epigrammatists; his fancy reappears with diminished brilliancy in Philodemus's contemporary, Zonas, in Crinagoras, who wrote under Augustus, and in Marcus Argentarius, of uncertain date; his peculiar gorgeousness of colouring remains entirely his own. At a later period of the empire another _genre_, hitherto comparatively in abeyance, was developed, the satirical. Lucillius, who flourished under Nero, and Lucian, more renowned in other fields of literature, display a remarkable talent for shrewd, caustic epigram, frequently embodying moral reflexions of great cogency, often las.h.i.+ng vice and folly with signal effect, but not seldom indulging in mere trivialities, or deformed by scoffs at personal blemishes. This style of composition is not properly Greek, but Roman; it answers to the modern definition of epigram, and has hence attained a celebrity in excess of its deserts. It is remarkable, however, as an almost solitary example of direct Latin influence on Greek literature. The same style obtains with Palladas, an Alexandrian grammarian of the 4th century, the last of the strictly cla.s.sical epigrammatists, and the first to be guilty of downright bad taste. His better pieces, however, are characterized by an austere ethical impressiveness, and his literary position is very interesting as that of an indignant but despairing opponent of Christianity. 4. The fourth or Byzantine style of epigrammatic composition was cultivated by the _beaux-esprits_ of the court of Justinian. To a great extent this is merely imitative, but the circ.u.mstances of the period operated so as to produce a species of originality. The peculiarly ornate and _recherche_ diction of Agathias and his compeers is not a merit in itself, but, applied for the first time, it has the effect of revivifying an old form, and many of their new locutions are actual enrichments of the language. The writers, moreover, were men of genuine poetical feeling, ingenious in invention, and capable of expressing emotion with energy and liveliness; the colouring of their pieces is sometimes highly dramatic.

It would be hard to exaggerate the substantial value of the Anthology, whether as a storehouse of facts bearing on antique manners, customs and ideas, or as one among the influences which have contributed to mould the literature of the modern world. The mult.i.tudinous votive inscriptions, serious and sportive, connote the phases of Greek religious sentiment, from pious awe to irreverent familiarity and sarcastic scepticism; the moral tone of the nation at various periods is mirrored with corresponding fidelity; the sepulchral inscriptions admit us into the inmost sanctuary of family affection, and reveal a depth and tenderness of feeling beyond the province of the historian to depict, which we should not have surmised even from the dramatists; the general tendency of the collection is to display antiquity on its most human side, and to mitigate those contrasts with the modern world which more ambitious modes of composition force into relief. The constant reference to the details of private life renders the Anthology an inexhaustible treasury for the student of archaeology; art, industry and costume receive their fullest ill.u.s.tration from its pages. Its influence on European literatures will be appreciated in proportion to the inquirer's knowledge of each. The further his researches extend, the greater will be his astonishment at the extent to which the Anthology has been laid under contribution for thoughts which have become household words in all cultivated languages, and at the beneficial effect of the imitation of its brevity, simplicity, and absolute verbal accuracy upon the undisciplined luxuriance of modern genius.

_Translations, Imitations, &c._--The best versions of the Anthology ever made are the Latin renderings of select epigrams by Hugo Grotius.

They have not been printed separately, but will be found in Bosch and Lennep's edition of the Planudean _Anthology_, in the Didot edition, and in Dr Wellesley's _Anthologia Polyglotta_. The number of more or less professed imitations in modern languages is infinite, that of actual translations less considerable. French and Italian, indeed, are ill adapted to this purpose, from their incapacity of approximating to the form of the original, and their poets have usually contented themselves with paraphrases or imitations, often exceedingly felicitous. F.D. Deheque's French prose translation, however (1863), is most excellent and valuable. The German language alone admits of the preservation of the original metre--a circ.u.mstance advantageous to the German translators, Herder and Jacobs, who have not, however, compensated the loss inevitably consequent upon a change of idiom by any added beauties of their own. Though unfitted to reproduce the precise form, the English language, from its superior terseness, is better adapted to preserve the spirit of the original than the German; and the comparative ill success of many English translators must be chiefly attributed to the extremely low standard of fidelity and brevity observed by them. Bland, Merivale, and their a.s.sociates (1806-1813), are often intolerably diffuse and feeble, from want, not of ability, but of taking pains. Archdeacon Wrangham's too rare versions are much more spirited; and John Sterling's translations of the inscriptions of Simonides deserve high praise. Professor Wilson (_Blackwood's Magazine_, 1833-1835) collected and commented upon the labours of these and other translators, with his accustomed critical insight and exuberant geniality, but damaged his essay by burdening it with the indifferent attempts of William Hay. In 1849 Dr Wellesley, princ.i.p.al of New Inn Hall, Oxford, published his _Anthologia Polyglotta_, a most valuable collection of the best translations and imitations in all languages, with the original text. In this appeared some admirable versions by Goldwin Smith and Dean Merivale, which, with the other English renderings extant at the time, will be found accompanying the literal prose translation of the _Public School Selections_, executed by the Rev. George Burges for Bohn's Cla.s.sical Library (1854). This is a useful volume, but the editor's notes are worthless. In 1864 Major R.G. Macgregor published an almost complete translation of the Anthology, a work whose stupendous industry and fidelity almost redeem the general mediocrity of the execution.

_Idylls and Epigrams_, by R. Garnett (1869, reprinted 1892 in the Cameo series), includes about 140 translations or imitations, with some original compositions in the same style. Recent translations (selections) are: J.W. Mackail, _Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology_ (with text, introduction, notes, and prose translation), 1890, revised 1906, a most charming volume; Graham R. Tomson (Mrs Marriott Watson), _Selections from the Greek Anthology_ (1889); W.H.D.

Rouse, _Echo of Greek Song_ (1899); L.C. Perry, _From the Garden of h.e.l.las_ (New York, 1891); W.R. Paton, _Love Epigrams_ (1898). An agreeable little volume on the Anthology, by Lord Neaves, is one of Collins's series of _Ancient Cla.s.sics for Modern Readers_. The earl of Cromer, with all the cares of Egyptian administration upon him, found time to translate and publish an elegant volume of selections (1903).

Two critical contributions to the subject should be noticed, the Rev.

James Davies's essay on Epigrams in the _Quarterly Review_ (vol.

cxvii.), especially valuable for its lucid ill.u.s.tration of the distinction between Greek and Latin epigram; and the brilliant disquisition in J.A. Symonds's _Studies of the Greek Poets_ (1873; 3rd ed., 1893).

_Latin Anthology._--The _Latin Anthology_ is the appellation bestowed upon a collection of fugitive Latin verse, from the age of Ennius to about A.D. 1000, formed by Peter Burmann the Younger. Nothing corresponding to the Greek anthology is known to have existed among the Romans, though professional epigrammatists like Martial published their volumes on their own account, and detached sayings were excerpted from authors like Ennius and Publius Syrus, while the _Priapea_ were probably but one among many collections on special subjects. The first general collection of scattered pieces made by a modern scholar was Scaliger's _Catalecta veterum Poetarum_ (1573), succeeded by the more ample one of Pithoeus, _Epigrammata et Poemata e Codicibus et Lapidibus collecta_ (1590). Numerous additions, princ.i.p.ally from inscriptions, continued to be made, and in 1759-1773 Burmann digested the whole into his _Anthologia veterum Latinorum Epigrammatum et Poematum_. This, occasionally reprinted, was the standard edition until 1869, when Alexander Riese commenced a new and more critical recension, from which many pieces improperly inserted by Burmann are rejected, and his cla.s.sified arrangement is discarded for one according to the sources whence the poems have been derived. The first volume contains those found in MSS., in the order of the importance of these doc.u.ments; those furnished by inscriptions following. The first volume (in two parts) appeared in 1869-1870, a second edition of the first part in 1894, and the second volume, _Carmina Epigraphica_ (in two parts), in 1895-1897, edited by F. Bucheler. An _Anthologiae Latinae Supplementa_, in the same series, followed. Having been formed by scholars actuated by no aesthetic principles of selection, but solely intent on preserving everything they could find, the Latin anthology is much more heterogeneous than the Greek, and unspeakably inferior. The really beautiful poems of Petronius and Apuleius are more properly inserted in the collected editions of their writings, and more than half the remainder consists of the frigid conceits of pedantic professional exercises of grammarians of a very late period of the empire, relieved by an occasional gem, such as the apostrophe of the dying Hadrian to his spirit, or the epithalamium of Gallienus. The collection is also, for the most part, too recent in date, and too exclusively literary in character, to add much to our knowledge of cla.s.sical antiquity. The epitaphs are interesting, but the genuineness of many of them is very questionable. (R. G.)

ANTHON, CHARLES (1797-1867), American cla.s.sical scholar, was born in New York city on the 19th of November 1797. After graduating with honours at Columbia College in 1815, he began the study of law, and in 1819 was admitted to the bar, but never practised. In 1820 he was appointed a.s.sistant professor of Greek and Latin in his old college, full professor ten years later, and at the same time headmaster of the grammar school attached to the college, which post he held until 1864.

He died at New York on the 29th of July 1867. He produced for use in colleges and schools a large number of cla.s.sical works, which enjoyed great popularity, although his editions of cla.s.sical authors were by no means in favour with schoolmasters, owing to the large amount of a.s.sistance, especially translations, contained in the notes.

ANTHONY, SAINT, the first Christian monk, was born in Egypt about 250.

At the age of twenty he began to practise an ascetical life in the neighbourhood of his native place, and after fifteen years of this life he withdrew into solitude to a mountain by the Nile, called Pispir, now Der el Memun, opposite Arsinoe in the Fayum. Here he lived strictly enclosed in an old fort for twenty years. At last in the early years of the 4th century he emerged from his retreat and set himself to organize the monastic life of the crowds of monks who had followed him and taken up their abode in the caves around him. After a time, again in pursuit of more complete solitude, he withdrew to the mountain by the Red Sea, where now stands the monastery that bears his name (Der Mar Antonios).

Here he died about the middle of the 4th century. His _Life_ states that on two occasions he went to Alexandria, to strengthen the Christians in the Diocletian persecution and to preach against Arianism. Anthony is recognized as the first Christian monk and the first organizer and father of Christian monachism (see MONASTICISM). Certain letters and sermons are attributed to him, but their authenticity is more than doubtful. The monastic rule which bears his name was not written by him, but was compiled out of these writings and out of discourses and utterances put into his mouth in the _Life_ and the _Apophthegmata Patrum_. According to this rule live a number of Coptic Syrian and Armenian monks to this day. The chief source of information about St Anthony is the _Life_, attributed to St Athanasius. This attribution, as also the historical character of the book, and even the very existence of St Anthony, were questioned and denied by the sceptical criticism of thirty years ago; but such doubts are no longer entertained by critical scholars.

The Greek _Vita_ is among the works of St Athanasius; the almost contemporary Latin translation is among Rosweyd's _Vitae Patrum_ (Migne, _Patrol. Lat_. lxxiii.); an English translation is in the Athanasius volume of the ”Nicene and Post-Nicene Library.” Accounts of St Anthony are given by Card. Newman, _Church of the Fathers_ (Historical Sketches) and Alban Butler, _Lives of the Saints_ (Jan.

17). Discussions of the historical and critical questions raised will be found in E.C. Butler's _Lausiac History of Palladius_ (1898, 1904), Part I. pp. 197, 215-228; Part II. pp. ix.-xii. (E. C. B.)

ANTHONY OF PADUA, SAINT (1195-1231), the most celebrated of the followers of Saint Francis of a.s.sisi, was born at Lisbon on the 15th of August 1195. In his fifteenth year he entered the Augustinian order, and subsequently joined the Franciscans in 1220. He wished to devote himself to missionary labours in North Africa, but the s.h.i.+p in which he sailed was cast by a storm on the coast of Sicily, whence he made his way to Italy. He taught theology at Bologna, Toulouse, Montpellier and Padua, and won a great reputation as a preacher throughout Italy. He was the leader of the rigorous party in the Franciscan order against the mitigations introduced by the general Elias. His death took place at the convent of Ara Coeli, near Padua, on the 13th of June 1231. He was canonized by Gregory IX. in the following year, and his festival is kept on the 13th of June. He is regarded as the patron saint of Padua and of Portugal, and is appealed to by devout clients for finding lost objects.

The meagre accounts of his life which we possess have been supplemented by numerous popular legends, which represent him as a continuous worker of miracles, and describe his marvellous eloquence by pictures of fishes leaping out of the water to hear him. There are many confraternities established in his honour throughout Christendom, and the number of ”pious” biographies devoted to him would fill many volumes.

The most trustworthy modern works are by A. Lepitre, _St Antoine de Padoue_ (Paris, 1902, in _Les Saints_ series: good bibliography; Eng.

trans. by Edith Guest, London, 1902), and by Leopold de Cherance, _St Antoine de Padoue_ (Paris, 1895; Eng. trans., London, 1896). His works, consisting of sermons and a mystical commentary on the Bible, were published in an appendix to those of St Francis, in the _Annales Minorum_ of Luke Wadding (Antwerp, 1623), and are also reproduced by Horoy, _Medii aevi bibliotheca patristica_ (1880, vi. pp. 555 et sqq.); see art. ”Antonius von Padua” in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyklopadie_.

ANTHONY, SUSAN BROWNELL (1820-1906), American reformer, was born at Adams, Ma.s.sachusetts, on the 15th of February 1820, the daughter of Quakers. Soon after her birth, her family moved to the state of New York, and after 1845 she lived in Rochester. She received her early education in a school maintained by her father for his own and neighbours' children, and from the time she was seventeen until she was thirty-two she taught in various schools. In the decade preceding the outbreak of the Civil War she took a prominent part in the anti-slavery and temperance movements in New York, organizing in 1852 the first woman's state temperance society in America, and in 1856 becoming the agent for New York state of the American Anti-slavery Society. After 1854 she devoted herself almost exclusively to the agitation for woman's rights, and became recognized as one of the ablest and most zealous advocates, both as a public speaker and as a writer, of the complete legal equality of the two s.e.xes. From 1868 to 1870 she was the proprietor of a weekly paper, _The Revolution_, published in New York, edited by Mrs Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and having for its motto, ”The true republic--men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.” She was vice-president-at-large of the National Woman's Suffrage a.s.sociation from the date of its organization in 1869 until 1892, when she became president. For casting a vote in the presidential election of 1872, as, she a.s.serted, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Const.i.tution ent.i.tled her to do, she was arrested and fined $100, but she never paid the fine. In collaboration with Mrs Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mrs Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Mrs Ida Husted Harper, she published _The History of Woman Suffrage_ (4 vols., New York, 1884-1887). She died at Rochester, New York, on the 13th of March 1906.

See Mrs Ida Husted Harper's _Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_ (3 vols., Indianapolis, 1898-1908).

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