The growing appreciation of this kind of writing had already led Meleager, a cynic philosopher of Gadara, to form the first collection of Greek epigrams, which he prettily termed the anthology or bouquet.  Martial has been commended at the expense of the Greeks, but he borrowed considerably from them in form and matter.  His epigrams were more uniformly suggestive and concentrated than those of any previous writer, and he largely contributed to raise such compositions from being merely inscriptive into a branch of literature.  He opened a new field, and the larger portion of these productions in Greek were written about this time.  They are not generally humorous, with the exception of a few from Philo and Leonidas of Alexandria who lived about 60 B.C., from Ammianus in 120 B.C., and from Lucilius, a great composer of this kind, of whose history nothing is known but that he lived in the reign of Nero.  The following are from the last-mentioned.

“Some say, Nicylla, that thou dyest thy hair, which thou boughtest most black at the market.”

“All the astrologers prophesied that my uncle would be long-lived except Hermocleides, who said he would not be so.  This, however, was not until we were lamenting his death.”

The following are free translations from the same writer.

  “Poor Cleon out of envy died,
   His brother thief to see
   Nailed near him to be crucified
   Upon a higher tree.”

On a bad painter.

  “You paint Deucalion and Phaeton,
   And ask what price for each you should require;
   I’ll tell you what they’re worth before you’ve done,
   One deserves water, and the other fire.”

The works of Lucian are generally regarded as forming a part of Roman literature, although they were written in Greek by a native of Samosata in Syria.  In them we have an intermingling of the warm imagination of the East with the cold sceptical philosophy of the West.  Lucian was originally brought up to be a stone-cutter, but he had an insatiable desire for learning, and in his “Dream” he tells us how he seemed to be carried aloft on the wings of Pegasus.  He became a pleader at the bar, but soon found that “deceit, lies, impudence, and chicanery” were inseparable from that profession.  In disgust he betook himself to philosophy, but could not restrain his indignation when he found so many base men throwing the blame of their conduct on Plato, Chrysippus, Pythagoras, and other great men.  “A fellow who tells you that the wise man alone is rich, comes the next moment and asks you for money—­just as if a person in regal array should go about begging.”  He says they pay no more attention to the doctrines they teach than if their words were tennis balls to play with in schools.  “There is,” he continues, “a story told of a certain king of Egypt, who took a fancy to have apes taught to dance.  The apes, as they are apt to mimic human actions, came on in their lessons and improved very