From the name of Palladas is inseparable the name of the famous Hypatia, and the strange history of the Neo-Platonic school. The last glimmer of light in the ancient world was from the embers of their philosophy. A few late epigrams preserve a record of their mystical doctrines, and speak in half-unintelligible language of "the one hope" that went among them, a veiled and crowned phantom, under the name of Wisdom. But, apart from those lingering relics of a faith among men half dreamers and half charlatans, patience and silence were the only two counsels left for the dying ancient world; patience, in which we imitate God himself; silence, in which all our words must soon end.[20] The Roman empire perished, it has been said, for want of men; Greek literature perished for want of anything to say; or rather, because it found nothing in the end worth saying. Its end was like that recorded of the noblest of the Roman emperors;[21] the last word uttered with its dying breath was the counsel of equanimity. Men had once been comforted for their own life and death in the thought of deathless memorials; now they had lost hope, and declared that no words and no gods could give immortality.[22] Resignation[23] was the one lesson left to ancient literature, and, this lesson once fully learned, it naturally and silently died. All know how the ages that followed were too preoccupied to think of writings its epitaph. For century after century Goth and Hun, Lombard and Frank, Bulgarian and Avar, Norman and Saracen, Catalan and Turk rolled on in a ceaseless storm of slaughter and rapine without; for century after century within raged no less fiercely the unending fury of the new theology. Filtered down through Byzantine epitomes, through Arabic translations, through every sort of strange and tortuous channel, a vague and distorted tradition of this great literature just survived long enough to kindle the imagination of the fifteenth century. The chance of history, fortunate perhaps for the whole world, swept the last Greek scholars away from Constantinople to the living soil of Italy, carrying with them the priceless relics of forgotten splendours. To some broken stones, and to the chance which saved a few hundred manuscripts from destruction, is due such knowledge as we have to-day of that Greek thought and life which still remains to us in many ways an unapproached ideal. ---------- [1] Anth. Pal. v. 12; cf. the beautiful lyric with the refrain /Lytyll ioye is son done/ (Percy Society, 1847). [2] Anth. Pal. xi. 56. [3] Cf. Ibid. xi. 25, 43; xii. 50. [4] Theognis, 877, Bergk. [5] Anth. Pal. ix. 412. [6] Ibid. xi. 23. [7] Archestr. ap. Athenaeum, vii. 286 a; {kan apothneskein melles, arpason, . . kata usteron eoe o ti soi pepromenon estin}. [8] Anth. Pal. xi. 3, 43, 56. [9] Infra, xii. 19, 31, 24, 21. [10] Citharist. Fr. 1, {ar esti suggenes to lupe kai bios}. [11] Il. xvii. 443-447.