[12] Theognis, 425-8, Bergk. [13] Oed. Col. 1225-8. [14] Fr. Scyr. 500. [15] Hypobolimaeus, Fr. 2. [16] Anth. Pal. vii. 472. [17] Ibid. x. 84. [18] Ibid. x. 123. [19] Ibid. x. 85. [20] Ibid. x. 94, xi. 300. [21] /Signum/ Aequanimitatis /dedit atque ita conversus quasi dormiret spiritum reddidit./ Jul. Capitol., /Antoninus Pius/, c. xii. [22] Anth. Pal. vii. 300, 362. [23] {Esukhien agapan}, Ibid. x. 77. XVI That ancient world perished; and all the while, side by side with it, a new world was growing up with which it had so little in common that hitherto it would only have been confusing to take the latter much into account. This review of the older civilisation has, so far as may be, been kept apart from all that is implied by the introduction of Christianity; it has even spoken of the decay and death of literature, though literature and thought in another field were never more active than in the early centuries of the Church. Of the immense gain that came then to the world it is not necessary to speak; we all know it. For the latter half of the period of human history over which the Greek Anthology stretches, this new world was in truth the more important of the two. While to the ageing Greek mind life had already lost its joy, and thought begun to sicken, we hear the first notes of a new glory and passion; {Egeire o katheudon Kai anasta ek ton vekron Kai epiphausei soi o KHristos}[1]-- in this broken fragment of shapeless and barbaric verse, not in the smooth and delicate couplets of contemporary poets, Polyaenus or Antiphilus, lay the germ of the music which was to charm the centuries that followed. Even through the long swoon of art which is usually thought of as following the darkness of the third century, the truth was that art was transforming itself into new shapes and learning a new language. The last words of the Neo-Platonic philosophy with its mystical wisdom were barely said when the Church of the Holy Wisdom rose in Constantinople, the most perfect work of art that has yet been known in organic beauty of design and splendour of ornament; and when Justinian by his closure of the schools of Athens marked off, as by a precise line, the end of the ancient world, in the Greek monasteries of Athos new types of beauty were being slowly wrought out which passed outward from land to land, transfiguring the face of the world as they went, kindling new life wherever they fell, miraculously transformed by the separate genius of every country from Norway to India, creating in Italy the whole of the great medieval art that stretches from Duccio and Giotto to Signorelli, and leaving to us here, as our most precious inheritances, such mere blurred and broken fragments of their glories as the cathedral churches of Salisbury and Winchester.