she sits, sunk in day-dreams, over her loom;[7] it passes away again in the portrait of the girl growing up with the sweet eyes of her mother, the budding rose that will soon unfold its heart of flame;[8] and once more the bride renders thanks for perfect felicity to the gods who have given her "a stainless youth and the lover whom she desired."[9] Many of the most beautiful of the dedicatory epigrams are thanksgivings after the birth of children; in one a wife says that she is satisfied with the harmonious life that she and her husband live together, and asks no further good.[10] Even death coming at the end of such a life is disarmed of terror. In one of the most graceful epitaphs of the Roman period[11] the dead man sums up the happiness of his long life by saying that he never had to weep for any of his children, and that their tears over him had no bitterness. The inscription placed by Androtion over the yet empty tomb, which he has built for himself and his wife and children, expresses that placid acceptance which finds no cause of complaint with life.[12] Family affection in an unbroken home; long and happy life of the individual, and still longer, that of the race which remains; the calm acquiescence in the law of life which is also the law of death, and the desire that life and death alike may have their ordinary place and period, not breaking use and wont; all this is implied here rather than expressed, in words so simple and straightforward that they seem to have fallen by accident, as it were, into verse. Thus too in another epigram the dying wife's last words are praise to the gods of marriage that she has had even such a husband, and to the gods of death that he and their children survive her.[13] Or again, where there is a cry of pain over severance, it is the sweetness of the past life that makes parting so bitter; "what is there but sorrow," says Marathonis over the tomb of Nicopolis,[14] "for a man alone upon earth when his wife is gone?" ---------- [1] Anth. Pal. ix. 649. [2] Ibid. vi. 267, 280, 340. [3] Ibid. vi. 226, vii. 156. [4] {Dunatai to ploutein kai philanthropous poiein}, Menand., {Alieis} fr. 7; Anth. Pal. ix. 172. [5] Anth. Pal. vi. 308, ix. 326. [6] Ibid. v. 297. [7] Ibid. vi. 266. [8] Ibid. vi. 353, v. 124. [9] Ibid. vi. 59. [10] Ibid. vi. 209. [11] Ibid. vii. 260. [12] Ibid. vii. 228. [13] Anth. Pal. vii. 555. [14] Ibid. vii. 340. IX