And Fate seemed to take a positive pleasure in eluding anticipation and constructing dramatic surprises. Through all Greek literature this feeling shows itself; and later epigrams are full of incidents of this sort, recounted and moralised over with the wearisomeness of a tract, stories sometimes obviously invented with an eye to the moral, sometimes merely silly, sometimes, though rarely, becoming imaginative. The contrast of a youth without means to indulge its appetites and an age without appetites to exhaust its means; the story of the poor man who found treasure and the rich man who hanged himself; the fable of the vine's revenge upon the goat, are typical instances of the prosaic epigram.[12] The noble lines inscribed upon the statue of Memnon at Thebes[13] are an example of the vivid imaginative touch lighting up a sufficiently obvious theme for the rhetorician. Under the walls of Troy, long ages past, the son of Dawn had fallen under Achilles' terrible spear; yet now morning by morning the goddess salutes her son and he makes answer, while Thetis is childless in her sea-halls, and the dust of Achilles moulders silently in the Trojan plain. The Horatian maxim of /nulli satis cautum/ recurs in the story of the ship, that had survived its sea-perils, burnt at last as it lay on shore near its native forest, and finding the ocean less faithless than the land.[14] In a different vein is the sarcastic praise of Fortune for her exaltation of a worthless man to high honour, "that she might shew her omnipotence."[15] At the root of all there is the sense, born of considering the flux of things and the tyranny of time, that man plays a losing game, and that his only success is in refusing to play. For the busy and idle, for the fortunate and unhappy alike, the sun rises one morning for the last time;[16] he only is to be congratulated who is done with hope and fear;[17] how short-lived soever he be in comparison with the world through which he passes, yet no less through time Fate dries up the holy springs, and the mighty cities of old days are undecipherable under the green turf;[18] it is the only wisdom to acquiesce in the forces, however ignorant or malign in their working, that listen to no protest and admit no appeal, that no force can affect, no subtlety elude, no calculation predetermine. ---------- [1] {to theion pan phthoneron te kai tarakhodes}, Hdt. i. 32. [2] Anth. Pal. v. 74, 118. [3] Ibid. xi. 53; xii. 32, 234. [4] Anth. Pal. vii. 472. [5] Ibid. xi. 25; xii. 50. [6] Ibid. v. 85. [7] Ibid. xi. 37. [8] Ibid. x. 71. [9] Ibid. ix. 51. [10] Ibid. vii. 705, 723; ix. 28, 101-4, 151-6, 408. [11] Anth. Pal. ix. 269. [12] Ibid. ix. 138, 44, 75. [13] ix. 19 in this selection. [14] Anth. Pal. ix. 106. [15] Ibid. ix. 530. [16] Ibid. ix. 8. [17] Ibid. ix. 172; xi. 282. [18] Ibid. ix. 101, 257. XIV