This is a sentence merely; an abstract moral idea, with an illustration attached to it. Compare with it another couplet[11] in the Anthology: {Aion panta pserei dolikhos khronos oioen ameibein ounoma xai morpsen xai psuain ede tukhen} Here too there is a moral idea; but in the expression, abstract as it is, there is just that high note, that imaginative touch, which gives it at once the gravity of an inscription and the quality of a poem. Again, many of the so-called epideictic epigrams are little more than stories told shortly in elegiac verse, much like the stories in Ovid's Fasti. Here the inscriptional quality is the surest test. It is this quality, perhaps in many instances due to the verses having been actually written for paintings or sculptures, that just makes an epigram of the sea-story told by Antipater of Thessalonica, and of the legend of Eunomus the harp-player[12]; while other stories, such as those told of Pittacus, of Euctemon, of Serapis and the murderer,[13] both tend to exceed the reasonable limit of length, and have in no degree either the lapidary precision of the half lyrical passion which would be necessary to make them more than tales in verse. Once more, the fragments of idyllic poetry which by chance have come down to us incorporated in the Anthology,[14] beautiful as they are, are in no sense epigrams any more than the lyrics ascribed to Anacreon which form an appendix to the Palatine collection, or the quotations from the dramatists, Euripides, Menander, or Diphilus,[15] which have also at one time or another become incorporated with it.