After Justinian the art practically died out. The pedantic rigour of Byzantine scholarship was little favourable to the poetry of emotion, and the spoken language had now fallen so far apart from the literary idiom that only scholars were capable of writing in the old classical forms. The popular love-poetry, if it existed, has perished and left no traces; henceforth, for the five centuries that elapsed till the birth of Provençal and Italian poetry, love lay voiceless, as though entranced and entombed. ---------- [1] Cf. Il. iii. 156; Anth. Pal. ix. 166. [2] Il. i. 298. [3] Il. xxiv. 130. [4] Il. xxii. 126-8. [5] Od. vi. 185. [6] {ear umnon}, Anth. Pal. vii. 12. [7] Vopisc. Aurel. c. 29. [8] Frag. 33 Bergk. [9] Fragg. 93, 102, 106 Bergk. [10] ll. 781, foll. [11] ll. 332, foll. [12] Theocr. i. 85. [13] ll. 105-110 of this poem set beside Sappho, Fr. ii. ll. 9-16, Bergk, are a perfect example of the pastoral in contrast with the lyrical treatment. [14] App. Plan. 210. [15] Anth. Pal. xii. 158, {soi me, Theokleis, abropedilos Eros gumnon upestoresen}. [16] Ibid. xii. 109; cf. v. 163, 172; xii. 154. [17] Ibid. xii. 132, 164. [18] Ibid. xii. 167. [19] Ibid. v. 214. [20] Ibid. v. 177. [21] Ibid. v. 225. [22] Ibid. v. 155. [23] Ibid. xii. 157. [24] Anth. Pal. xii. 47. [25] Ibid. v. 177. [26] Ibid. v. 176, 180; xii. 72. [27] Ibid. v. 136, 147. [28] Ibid. v. 147, 198. [29] Ibid. v. 241; cf. Passionate Pilgrim, xiv., xv. [30] App. Plan. 278. VII Closely connected with the passion of love as conceived by Greek writers is a subject which continually meets us in Greek literature, and which fills so large a part of the Anthology that it can hardly be passed over without notice. The few epigrams selected from the Anthology of Strato and included in this collection under the heading of Beauty are not of course a representative selection. Of the great mass of those epigrams no selection is possible or desirable. They belong to that side of Greek life which is akin to the Oriental world, and remote and even revolting to the western mind. And on this subject the common moral sense of civilised mankind has pronounced a judgment which requires no justification as it allows of no appeal.