Two epigrams above all deserve special notice; one almost universally known, that written by Callimachus on his dead friend, the poet Heraclitus of Halicarnassus; the other, no less noble, though it has not the piercing tenderness of the first, by Claudius Ptolemaeus, the great astronomer, upon his own science, a science then not yet divorced from art and letters. The picture touched by Callimachus of that ancient and brilliant life, where two friends, each an accomplished scholar, each a poet, saw the summer sun set in their eager talk, and listened through the dusk to the singing nightingales, is a more exquisite tribute than all other ancient writings have given to the imperishable delight of literature, the mingled charm of youth and friendship, and the first stirring of the blood by poetry, and the first lifting of the soul by philosophy.[19] And on yet a further height, above the nightingales, under the solitary stars alone, Ptolemy as he traces the celestial orbits is lifted above the touch of earth, and recognises in man's mortal and ephemeral substance a kinship with the eternal. /Man did eat angels' food: he opened the doors of heaven./[20] ---------- [1] Anth. Pal. vii. 39, 34, 21, 22. [2] Ibid. ix. 97, 358, 205. [3] Cf. iv. 1 in this selection. [4] Anth. Pal. vii. 696, App. Plan. 8, 225, 226, 244. [5] Anth. Pal. ix. 433. On this epigram Jacobs says, /Frigide hoc carmen interpretantur qui illud tabulae pictae adscriptum fuisse existimant/. But the art of poems on pictures, which flourished to an immense degree in the Alexandrian and later periods, had not then been revived. One can fancy the same note being made hundreds of years hence on some of Rossetti's sonnets. [6] Anth. Pal. xi. 215, 133, 143, 354, 136. [7] Ibid. vi. 303, ix. 174, vi. 310; cf. also x. 35 in this selection. [8] Ibid. xi. 400. [9] Compare Anth. Pal. xii. 43 with ix. 565. [10] Ibid. xi. 140, 142, 275. [11] Anth. Pal. ii., iii. [12] App. Plan. 200, 207, 208, 209, 214, 215, 250. [13] Anth. Pal. xi. 141, 142, 144, 157; vii. 571. [14] iv. 46 in this selection. [15] Poet. 1448 b. 15-20. [16] Republic, x. 597. [17] App. Plan. 248. [18] App. Plan. 146, 244. [19] Anth. Pal. vii. 80. Cf. In Memoriam, xxiii. [20] Anth. Pal. ix. 577; notice especially {theies pimplamai ambrosies}. XI