Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/402

Hope is stronger far than truth,
While the blood is warm with youth,
While the bloom is on the cheek—
Passion strong and wisdom weak—
Age, disease, and death are dim
To the sound in wind and limb.
Blind and thoughtless! lo, for man,
Youth and life—how short their span!
Knowing, then, how quick time flies,
Snatch all pleasures as they rise.’ ”

Numerous epigrams in Elegiac metre^[1] have been preserved in the Anthology, some of them attributed to writers famous in other departments of literature, as, for instance, Plato. One exquisite stanza, rightly or wrongly attributed to him, may be quoted:—

“Thou gazest on the stars, my star!
 Oh would I were the skies.
That I might look on thee afar
 With all those myriad eyes!”

Archilochus is said to have first used the Iambic metre in personal satire, “rage armed Archi-

1. Other Elegiac and Iambic poets are Archilochus (about B.C. 670), who was also known best for his Iambics; Simonides of Amorgos (about B.C. 660); Phocylides of Miletus (about B.C. 540), who also wrote Hexameters; Xenophanes of Colophon (about B.C. 510), the Eleatic philosopher; Hipponax of Ephesus (about B.C. 540), wrote Scazons, i.e., Iambics with a spondee in the last foot, copied afterwards by Callimachus (about B.C. 240) and Babrius, the fabulist (about A.D. 40). The Planudean Anthology was collected by Planudes Maximus, a monk of Constantinople (about A.D. 1330). There were other Anthologies: the most important is that called the Palatine Anthology, made by Constantinus Cephalus in the tenth century A.D., and rediscovered in Heidelberg in the library of the Palatine electors in 1606, by Salmasius. This is now the standard Greek Anthology.