Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/418

 394 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE There is something faint in his emotion, something con- tracted and over-refined in his range of interests. And a certain lack of spring and nimbleness amid all his grace of diction and versification seems sometimes to betray the foreigner. One suspects that, at home in Gadara, Greek was only his second language, and that he had talked Aramaic out of school. Perhaps his most ingenious work is the Proem to the Anthology, describing that metaphorical Garland : '■'■Whereunto many blooms brought Anyt^, Wild flags ; and Mosro many, — lilies white; And Sappho few, but roses." Antipater of Sidon was nearly equal to him ; Crina- GORAS is always good to read. And, as a matter of fact, there was work of this kind produced, much of it beautiful, much of it offensively corrupt, right on to the days of Palladas in the fifth century, of Agathias and Paul the Silentiary in the sixth. One cardinal obstacle to poetry in imperial times was the non-correspondence between metrical rules and real pronunciation, ^schylus and Sophocles had based their poetry on metre, on long and short syllables, because that was what they heard in the words they spoke. Aristo- phanes of Byzantium (257-180 B.C.) noticed, besides the divisions of long and short, a certain musical pitch in the words of an Attic sentence, and invented the system of accents for the instruction of foreigners in pronunciation. It is hard to realise the exact phonetic value of this * pitch- accent ' ; but it is certain that it did not affect poetry or even attract the notice of the ear in classical times, and that as late as the second century B.C. it was some- thing quite different from what we call accent, to wit,