We possess about a hundred amatory epigrams by this poet. Inferior perhaps in clearness of outline and depth of insight to those of the Alexandrian poet Asclepiades, they are unequalled in the width of range, the profusion of imagination, the subtlety of emotion with which they sound the whole lyre of passion. Meleager was born in a Syrian town and educated at Tyre in the last age of the Seleucid empire; and though he writes Greek with perfect mastery, it becomes in his hands almost a new language, full of dreams, at once more languid and more passionate. It was the fashion among Alexandrian poets to experiment in language; and Callimachus had in this way brought the epigram to the most elaborate jewel-finish; but in the work of Callimachus and his contemporaries the pure Greek tradition still survives. In Meleager, the touch of Asiatic blood creates a new type, delicate, exotic, fantastic. Art is no longer restrained and severe. The exquisite austerity of Greek poetry did not outlive the greatness of Athens; its perfect clearness of outline still survived in Theocritus; here both are gone. The atmosphere is loaded with a steam of perfumes, and with still unimpaired ease and perfection of hand there has come in a strain of the quality which of all qualities is the most remote from the Greek spirit, mysticism. Some of Meleager's epigrams are direct and simple, even to coarseness; but in all the best and most characteristic there is this vital difference from purely Greek art, that love has become a religion; the spirit of the East has touched them. It is this that makes Meleager so curiously akin to the medieval poets. Many of his turns of thought, many even of his actual expressions, have the closest parallel in poets of the fourteenth century who had never read a line of his work nor heard of his name. As in them, the religion of love is reduced to a theology; no subtlety, no fluctuation of fancy or passion is left unregistered, alike in their lighter and their graver moods. Sometimes the feeling is buried in masses of conceits, sometimes it is eagerly passionate, but even then always with an imaginative and florid passion, never directly as Sappho or Catullus is direct. Love appears in a hundred shapes amidst a shower of fantastic titles and attributes. Out of all the epithets that Meleager coins for him, one, set in a line of hauntingly liquid and languid rhythm, "delicate-sandalled,"[15] gives the key-note to the rest. Or again, he often calls him {glukupikros}, "bittersweet";[16] at first he is like wine mingled with honey for sweetness, but as he grows and becomes more tyrannous, his honey scorches and stings; and the lover, "set on fire and drenched to swooning with his ointments," drinks from a deeper cup and mingles his wine with burning tears.[17] Love the Reveller goes masking with the lover through stormy winter nights;[18] Love the Ball-player tosses hearts for balls in his hands;[19] Love the Runaway lies hidden in a