THE LOEB LIBRARY : SAPPHO AND OTHERS.* TEE five new

Loeb volumes, three Latin and two Greek, include the two final instalments of Professor H. E. Butler's admirable Quintilian.1 These fully maintain the high standard of their predecessors and it is a particular pleasure to have the Tenth Book accessible in such a convenient forth. The third Latin volume is the first of the Histeria Augusta2 (which will have three volumes altogether), edited by Mr. David Magic of Princeton. This Historic Augusta, or Vitae Diversorum Principum, consists of thirty biographies of Roman Emperors (or Imperial personages) written by some half-dozen undistinguished authors of the early fourth century, more or less in the manner (chiefly less, perhaps) of Suetonius. These biographies have small literary merit, they attempt no sympathetic interpretation of character, and they are singularly untrustworthy on questions of fact. Yet they are concerned with some great men (this volume contains the lives, among others, of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius) and they record a good deal about them which we should not otherwise have known. Gibbon used them as sources to some extent and paid them the compliment of borrowing several of his mistakes from them. It is certainly well to have a good text and a readable translation of this odd Historic, and Mr. Magic, though in the nature of things the appearance of his book cannot be hailed as a first-class astronomical phenomenon, has done good service to scholarship in bringing these half-dozen rather dim luminaries once again into view.

Biography is also the subject of Philostratus and Eunapius, whose Lives of the Sophists3 fill one of the Greek volumes. Philo- stratus, who lived early in the third century A.D., professes to write biographies of all the great Sophists from Protagoras of the fifth century "Lc. to those of his own time. There are some big omissions, however, in his list, and generally speaking his Lives are so short that their badness does not matter and so bad that their shortness is a merit. At any rate, on the greater Sophists of classical days, such as Protagoras himself, they are simply of no value at all. Still, read in Mr. Cave Wright's trans- lation and combined with his admirable introduction, they do enable one to form a fairly clear idea of the achievements of the Sophists of the early Empire. These men, though differing enormously among themselves in character and aim, managed between them to perform for some centuries in the Roman world the functions which are now divided among schoolmasters, • (1) The Inttitutio Oratoria of Quintilian. With an English translation by H. E. Butler, M.A. In 4 vols. Vols. III. and IV.—(2) Seriptores Histories Augustae. With an English translation by David Nagle, Pb.D. In 3 vols. Vol. L—(3) Philostratus and Eunapius: The Lives of the Sophists. With an English translation by Wilmer Cave Wright, Ph.D.—(4) Lyra Graeca : being the remains of all the Greek Lyric Poets from Eurnelus to Timotheus, excepting Pinder. Newly edited and translated by J. IL Edmonds. In S vole. Vol. I. All in the " Loeb Classical Library." London; W. -Heinemann. (lOs. net ter vol.

journalists, parsons and professors. That is to say, they edu- cated and amused the upper classes of society, preserved faith- fully the priceless tradition of a greater past and proved a perfectly effective barrier to real intellectual progress. Eunapius, a not very able pagan, wrote towards the end of the fourth Christian century in a world where (in the West at least) the Sophist was already being made humble by the Ecclesiastic and was soon to be made superfluous by the Barbarian. His own life was one long and pathetic struggle against the tendencies of the age. As Mr. Cave Wright notes, he lived to see the official abolition of Paganism and the destruction of Eleusis by Alaric the Goth. His life of Plotinus has interest and readers of Gibbon know him as a frequenter of the great man's footnotes.

By far the most striking of the new Loebs is a volume• of Greek lyric which contains hitherto unpublished fragments of Sappho and Alcaeus. It is the first of a series of three called Lyra Graeca,4 in which Mr. J. M. Edmonds is to exhibit " the remains of all the Greek lyric poets from Eumelus to Timotheus, excepting Pinder," and it will be surprising if the two later volumes can rival it in interest. Sappho and Alcaeus are great names, but for many centuries—at any rate, since Sappho's works were burned in 1073—they have been little more than names. Three short epigrams in the Anthology are attributed to Sappho, but otherwise we knew practically none of her work till the other day except such scraps as had chanced to be quoted for some reason by ancient authors—critics, grammarians, writers on metre and the like. These scraps included only two poems of over twelve lines, one of them being that astonishing lyric of passion which Catullus translated as " Ilk mi par ease deo videtur." There were also three or four of the shorter fragments which had great beauty, such as the famous three- line simile of the apple e . . . like the sweet apple which glows red on the topmost branch, high on the very topmost branch, and the apple-gatherers forgot it—nay forgot it not, but could not come to it. . . ."

But beyond that there was little of great poetic interest, and large numbers of the fragments consist of only one or two words. No. 187 in this collection, for instance, consists of only one word- " soda," or perhaps it should be " soap "—which a grammarian quotes because Sappho spells it in a particular way, and there are many others of no greater length or interest. But during the last twenty-five years the editors of the papyri found at Oxyrrhincus in Egypt and of other newly found fragments have been slowly giving us back our lost Greek poets. They only give us scraps, of course, but we now have. more scraps and bigger ones than we ever had before. Mr. Edmonds' volume, which gives all the work of Sappho and Alcaeus that is now known, contains twenty-four new fragments of Sappho and twenty-two of Alcaeus. Some fifteen of these in the case of Sappho and six or eight in the case of Alcaeus are long enough or complete enough to be appreciated individually as poems. The contribution which the book makes to our knowledge of early Greek lyric poetry is therefore very great and very important.

Perhaps some of the poems recovered may disappoint readers who come to them with high hopes, but fragments preserved only by chance cannot all be of the highest quality. There is at least as much of the beat here as we had any right to expect. Could there be a more attractive opening to a love-poem than this 7—

" 01 Aav irricov erpOrov In Si sritrdcor dt di raw isrl -yaw AtiXatrav lAttevat Kcatcrror tyto di Kip' dr- To) its Iparcu."

(" The fairest thing in all the world some say is a host of foot, and some again a navy of ships, but to me 'tis the heart's beloved.") Here is another, a complete letter, written in three-line stanzas, of which it is worth quoting Mr. Edmonds' version in full :- "Atthis, our beloved Anactoria, dwells in far-off Sardis, but she often sends her thoughts hither, thinking how once we used to live in the days when you wed,.-like a glorious Goddess to her and she loved your song the best. And now she shines among the dames of Lydia as after sunset the rosy-fingered Moon beside the stars that are about her, when she spreads her light o'er briny sea and even o'er flowery field, while the dew lies so fair on the ground and the roses revive and the dainty antluysc and the melilot with all its blooms. And oftentime while our beloved wanders" abroad, when she calls to mind the love of gentle Atthis, her tender breast, for sure, is weighed down deep with longing ; and she cries aloud for us to come thither ; and what she says we know full well, you and I, for Night that hath the many ears calls it to us across the dividing sea."

All Sappho's letters are not so charming as that. She writes more than once with considerable acrimony to her brother Charaxus—but then he should not have married that girl. The letters to Atthis are all delightful :—

" Dearest Atthis, can you then forget all this that happened in the old days ? (how at dawn you would call to me and say) Sappho, I swear if you oome not forth I will love you no more. 0 rise and shine upon us and set free your beloved strength from the bed, and then like a pure lily beside the spring hold aloof your Chian robe and wash you in the water. And Cleis shall bring down from your presses saffron smock and purple robe ; and let a mantle be put over you and crowned with a wreath of flowers tied about your head. And do you, Praxinoa, roast us nuts, so that I may make the maidens a sweeter breakfast. . . ."

Could Atthis indeed forget all that ?

The new fragments of Alcaeus, partly because many of them chance to be on political subjects, are hardly on the same poetic level as those of Sappho, though there is at least one fine drinking song and one interesting and rather pathetic poem to Melanippus, written in exile. But every one of the new fragments in this book, whatever its quality as literature, adds something, whether little or much, to our knowledge of these two Greek singers (of whom we have hitherto only known enough to make us long to know more) and for every one of them we are grateful.

The new poems have not been recovered for us without labour. Indeed, some of them have been rather reconquered than recovered, for the MSS. and papyri are all between a thousand and two thousand years old and they have offered greater diffi- culties to scholarship than it often in these days has to face. Much of the work has been done by Mr. Grenfell and Mr. Hunt, the discoverers and editors of the Oxyrrhincus papyri, and by the German editors of the Berliner Klassikertexte, but Mr. Edmonds himself has had to do a great deal in preparation for this edition. Few living scholars are better qualified for the task, as anyone can testify who has seen his contributions to the classical periodicals or who heard him a year ago at Cambridge re-creating Sappho's little poem, "To Times " (No. 87), of which, though it is not a new one, nothing satisfactory had till then been made. He is one of those textual critics who have an almost inspired power of seeing what an author must have written at a given point, and that is the quality in him which adds such great interest to another series of poems in this volume —those which the editor has literally " re-created " from para- phrases preserved in ancient writers. For instance; Hinterius, a fourth-century rhetorician, tells a tale in prose which he says he has transcribed direct from a poem of Alcaeus. Finding a fragment which appears to be the first line of this poem (other- wise lost) Mr. Edmonds reconstructs six Alcaic stanzas which keep as close as possible to the words of Himerius's paraphrase. The resulting poem is delightful, and it has a Teal value as a kind of reflection or echo of Alcaeus himself. Others of the recon- structions are based on ampler data and therefore show with greater certainty the kind of poem that the poet himself must have written. In the restoration of the poems which he actually did write, but which have been discovered in a damaged and deficient state, Mr. Edmonds has used with great effect a favourite method that he has of checking suggested readings. He de- scribes this method in his preface and gives examples. Where it is required to fill a gap, tracings of letters and letter-groups are made from the rest of the MS., and by reference to them the exact manuscript-length of any suggested group of letters is arrived at. It is then easy to see whether the suggested group could or could not really be what once filled the gap. " Scholars who have not tried this method," Mr. Edmonds says, " will be surprised when they do at the way in which it reduces possi- bilities." To see it applied in a concrete ease is of great interest to such scholars and others as do not often have the chance of working from an actual MS. or even from a good photograph of one.

Apart altogether from the new poems and the technical means by which their text has been established, this book has two great advantages over other editions of the lyric fragments. First, where a fragment is preserved as a quotation, the context of the quotation is given clearly and fully in small print before and after the fragment itself. For instance, the little poem "To Timis" (No. 87) is embedded in the Deipnosophista of Athenaeus. It appears in the book thus, the Greek version being opposite and arranged similarly :— " Athenaeus Doctors at Dinner And &peke when in the fifth

AIM

Book of her Lyric Poems she says to Aphrodite :

. . and hanging on either side thy face the purple handkerchief which Times zeal for thee from Phocaea, a precious gift from a precious giver ' . . .

means the handkerchief as an adornment of the head, as is shown also by Heeataeus."

Secondly, at the beginning of earl poet's work is printed what is called a " Life " of the poet. This consists of all the inter-

eating references to him in ancient writers, whether Greek or Latin, arranged in a coherent and intelligible order. All that there is to be known about Sappho and exactly how we know it can therefore be learnt by anyone who picks up the book and reads pages 140 to 180. This is an admirable arrangement and it completes the usefulness of one of the most important and delightful books that have been offered to lovers of Greek poetry for many years.