Yet even in this last dire struggle of the spirit of pagan art with the spirit of Christian faith, when beauty had become an abomination in the eyes of the Holiest, on the ruins, as it were, of the desecrated fanes of Hellas, weeds lovely in their rankness flourished. While Cyril's mobs were dismembering Hypatia, the erotic novelists went on writing about Daphnis, and Musæus sang the lamentable death of Leander. Nonnus was perfecting a new and more polished form of the hexameter. These were the last notes of Greek poetry. In these faint and too melodious strains the Muse took final farewell of her beloved Hellas. And when, after the lapse of a thousand years, the world awoke upon the ruins of the past, these were among the first melodies which caught its ear. One of the three first Greek books issued from the Aldine press about the year 1493, and called by Aldus the "precursors," was the poem of Hero and Leander. It was reprinted at Paris in 1507 by De Gourmont, at Alcala in Spain in 1514, and at Cologne in 1517 by Hirschhorn. Our Marlowe in the sixteenth century translated Musæus. The French Amyot translated Longus, and bequeathed to his nation a voluminous literature of pastorals founded upon the tale of Chloe. Tasso and Guarini, in Italy, caught the same strain; so that the accents of the modern Renaissance were an echo of the last utterances of dying Greece. The golden age of pastoral innocence, the _bell' età dell' oro_, of which the Alexandrians had been dreaming in the midst of their effete and decaying civilization, fascinated the imagination of our immediate ancestors, when, three centuries ago, they found the sun of art and beauty shining in the heavens, new worlds to conquer, and indefinite expansions of the spirit to be realized. FOOTNOTES: [1] My special debt to Hegel's _Philosophy of History_ in this paragraph ought to be acknowledged. [2] I do not mean by this that _one_ poet must have composed both epics, but that each bears upon it the mark of unity in conception and execution. Whether the same poet produced both is a different question, and I am inclined to accept the _Odyssey_ as a later work. [3] The date of Pheidon is in truth unfixed. According to recent calculations, he may have celebrated the 28th and not the 8th Olympiad. The involved alteration in his date would bring him into closer connection with the other despots. [4] The _Margites Eiresione_, attributed by the Greeks to Homer, contain possibly the earliest fragments of iambic verses. [5] Satire, it is well known, was permitted at some of the festivals of Demeter; and the legend of the maid Iambé, who alone could draw a smile from Demeter, after she had lost Persephone, seems to symbolize the connection of iambic recitations with the cultus of this goddess. [6] Nothing overmuch; measure is best; know thyself; know the right moment; against necessity not even gods fight. [7] Recent criticism renders the age and country of the critic Longinus doubtful.