Nor will it, I trust, while we are thus examining Miscellanea, be considered frivolous or superfluous to examine [Sidenote: _The Literary Epigrams of the Anthology._] that vast mass of information on Greek life and thought after the Golden Age which is called the _Greek Anthology_,[87] to see whether it can afford us any light. In this mass, with its thousands of articles ranging from exquisite to contemptible in actual literary quality, the range of subject is notoriously as wide as that of merit. The devotees of the Minor Muses of Hellas will “rhyme,” as we should say, anything from a riddle and an arithmetical conundrum, to Myron’s cow and the complimentary statues to the latest fashionable athlete. It would be odd, therefore, if books and authors escaped or were ignored, and they duly appear. In the battalions of _adespota_, besides a stray versification[88] of the rules for making iambics, and a wail[89] from some grammarian unnamed that he cannot write as well as Palladius or Palladas, we come to a considerable body[90] of literary epigrams arranged, by some one or other of the numerous ancient editors of the _Anthology_, in vaguely chronological order of subject. First, as in duty bound, come Linus and Orpheus, then a considerable batch on Homer, and then the long succession of poets and philosophers, dramatists and historians, to follow. For the most part, of course, the epigrams contain generalities and commonplaces, but with more or less of the neatness and prettiness that we associate with the very name of the _Anthology_; sometimes they go a little closer to the matter, as in the piece (523 of Jacobs) on Erinna’s much-praised “Distaff.” As we have only five[91] (and those not consecutive) out of the three hundred verses which this girl of nineteen years composed, it would be rash as well as unkind to question the judgment of the epigrammatist that they are “equal to Homer.” But it may safely be said that the judgment itself is in a rudimentary style of criticism. It is natural, but rather “tell-tale,” that the critic-poets always, when they can, take some non-literary point—Anacreon’s fondness for wine, the equality in number of the Muses and the books of Herodotus, the supposed physical and moral shortcomings of Aristotle, and the like. But sometimes they go higher. There is plenty of spirit and sense in the epigram on Panætius for pronouncing the _Phædo_ spurious,—as is well known, this idlest of critical debauches was at least as great a favourite with the ancients as with the moderns (548). Sometimes we get valuable testimony as to popular judgments—the unfeigned admiration which was felt for Menander, though the sounder critics might put him below Aristophanes; the mighty repute of Aristides of Smyrna (see p. 113) who is pretty certainly _not_ the Aristides congratulated ironically in another epigram as never having less than seven auditors—the four walls of the room, and the three benches in it.