'the sprinkled isles, Lily on lily that overlace the sea.'
Theirs is the age of the austerer mood, when the clean-cut marble outlines of a great language matured in its noblest expression. Then a century of song is followed by the period of the dramatists during which the lyric muse is almost silent, in an age of political and intellectual intensity.
A new epoch of lyrical revival is inaugurated by the advent of Alexander, and the wide extension of Hellenic culture to more distant areas of the Mediterranean. Then follows the long succession of poets who may generally be classified as of the school of Alexandria. Among them are three other women singers of high renown, Anyte of Tegea, Nossis of Locri in southern Italy, and Moero of Byzantium. The later writers of this period had lost the graver purity of the first lyric outburst, but they had gained by a wider range of sympathy and a closer touch with nature. This group may be said to close with Meleager, who was born in Syria and educated at Tyre, whose contact with the eastern world explains a certain suggestive and exotic fascination in his poetry which is not strictly Greek. The Alexandrian is followed by the Roman period, and the Roman by the Byzantine, in which the spirit of the muse of Hellas expires reluctantly in an atmosphere of bureaucratic and religious pedantry.
These few words of introduction should suffice, since the development of the lyric poetry of Greece and the characteristics of its successive exponents have been made familiar to English readers in the admirable work of my friend J.W. Mackail. A reference to his _Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology_ suggests one plea of justification for the present little collection of renderings, since the greater number of them have been by him translated incomparably well into prose.
Of the quality of verse translation there are many tests: the closeness with which the intention and atmosphere of the original has been maintained; the absence of extraneous additions; the omission of no essential feature, and the interpretation, by such equivalent as most adequately corresponds, of individualities of style and assonances of language. But not the least essential justification of poetical translation is that the version should constitute a poem on its own account, worthy to stand by itself on its own merits if the reader were unaware that it was a translation. It is to this test especially that renderings in verse too often fail to conform. I have discarded not a few because they seemed too obviously to bear the forced expression which the effort to interpret is apt to induce. Of those that remain some at least I hope approach the desired standard, failing to achieve which they would undoubtedly be better expressed in simple prose. And yet there is a value in rendering rhythm by rhythm where it is possible, and if any success has been attained, such translations probably convey more of the spirit of the original, which meant verse, with all which that implies, and not prose.