The earliest known anthology in Greek was compiled by Meleager of Gadara in the first centuryBC, under the title Anthologia, or "Flower-gathering." It contained poems by the compiler himself and forty-six other poets, including Archilochus, Alcaeus, Anacreon, and Simonides. In his preface to his collection, Meleager describes his arrangement of poems as if it were a head-band or garland of flowers woven together in a tour de force that made the word "Anthology" a synonym for a collection of literary works for future generations.
Meleager's Anthology was popular enough that it attracted later additions. Prefaces to the editions of Philippus of Thessalonica and Agathias were preserved in the Greek Anthology to attest to their additions of later poems. The definitive edition was made by Constantine Cephalas in the 10th century, who added a number of other collections: homoerotic verse collected by Straton of Sardis in the 2nd century AD; a collection of Christian epigrams found in churches; a collection of satirical and convivial epigrams collected by Diogenianus; Christodorus' description of statues in the Byzantine gymnasium of Zeuxippos; and a collection of inscriptions from a temple in Cyzicus.
The scholar Maximus Planudes also made an edition of the Greek Anthology, which while adding some poems, primarily deleted or bowdlerized many of the poems he felt were too explicit. His anthology was the only one known to Western Europe (his autograph copy, dated 1301 survives; the first edition based on his collection was printed in 1494) until 1606 when Claudius Salmasius found in the library at Heidelberg a fuller collection based on Cephalas. The copy made by Salmasius was not, however, published until 1776, when Richard François Philippe Brunck included it in his Analecta. The first critical edition was that of F. Jacobs (13 vols. 1794–1803; revised 1813–17).
Since its transmission to the rest of Europe, the Greek Anthology has left a deep impression on its readers. In a 1971 article on Robin Skelton's translation of a selection of poems from the Anthology, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement wrote, "The time of life does not exist when it is impossible to discover in it a masterly poem one had never seen before." Its influence can be seen on writers as diverse as Propertius, Ezra Pound and Edgar Lee Masters. Since full and uncensored English translations became available at the end of the 20th century, its influence has widened still further.
Literary history
The art of occasional poetry had been cultivated in Greece from an early period, being used to commemorate remarkable individuals or events, on funerary monuments and votive offerings. These compositions were termed epigrams, i.e. inscribed poems. Such a composition must necessarily be brief, and as a result, conciseness of expression, pregnancy of meaning, purity of diction and singleness of thought are the indispensable conditions of excellence in the epigrammatic style. The term was soon extended to any piece by which these conditions were fulfilled.[3]
About 60BC, the sophist and poet Meleager of Gadara undertook to combine the choicest effusions of his predecessors into a single body of fugitive poetry. Collections of monumental inscriptions, or of poems on particular subjects, had previously been formed by Polemon Periegetes and others; but Meleager first gave the principle a comprehensive application. His selection, compiled from forty-six of his predecessors, and including numerous contributions of his own, was entitled The Garland (Στέφανος); in an introductory poem each poet is compared to some flower, fancifully deemed appropriate to his genius. The arrangement of his collection was alphabetical, according to the initial letter of each epigram.[3]
In the age of the emperor Tiberius (or Trajan, according to others) the work of Meleager was continued by another epigrammatist, Philippus of Thessalonica, who first employed the term "anthology". His collection, which included the compositions of thirteen writers subsequent to Meleager, was also arranged alphabetically, and contained an introductory poem. It was of inferior quality to Meleager's. Somewhat later, under Hadrian, another supplement was formed by the sophist Diogenianus of Heracleia (2nd century AD), and Straton of Sardis compiled his elegant Μοῦσα παιδική (Musa Puerilis) from his productions and those of earlier writers. No further collection from various sources is recorded until the time of Justinian, when epigrammatic writing, especially of an amatory character, experienced a great revival at the hands of Agathias of Myrina, the historian, Paulus Silentiarius, and their circle. Their ingenious but mannered productions were collected by Agathias into a new anthology, entitled The Circle (Κύκλος); it was the first to be divided into books, and arranged with reference to the subjects of the pieces.[3]
These and other collections made during the Middle Ages are now lost. The partial incorporation of them into a single body, classified according to the contents in 15 books, was the work of a certain Constantinus Cephalas, whose name alone is preserved in the single MS. of his compilation extant, but who probably lived during the literary revival under Constantine Porphyrogenitus, at the beginning of the 10th century. He appears to have merely made excerpts from the existing anthologies, with the addition of selections from Lucillius, Palladas, and other epigrammatists, whose compositions had been published separately. His arrangement is founded on a principle of classification, and nearly corresponds to that adopted by Agathias. His principle of selection is unknown. The next editor was the monk Maximus Planudes (1320), who removed some epigrams from Cephalas' anthology, added some verses of his own, and preserved epigrams on works of art, which are not included in the only surviving transcript of Cephalas.[3]
The van Bosch and van Lennep version of The Greek Anthology (in five vols., begun by Bosch in 1795, finished and published by Lennep in 1822). Photographed at The British Museum, London. Contains the metrical Latin version of Grotius's Planudean version of the Anthology. Heavily illustrated. It also reprints the very error-prone Greek text of the Wechelian edition (1600) of the Anthology, which is itself a reprint of the 1566 Planudean edition by Henricus Stephanus
The Planudean Anthology (in seven books) was the only recension of the anthology known at the revival of classical literature, and was first published at Florence, by Janus Lascaris, in 1494. It long continued to be the only accessible collection, for although the Palatine manuscript known as the Palatine Anthology, the sole extant copy of the anthology of Cephalas, was discovered in the Palatine library at Heidelberg, and copied by Saumaise (Salmasius) in 1606, it was not published until 1776, when it was included in Brunck's Analecta Veterum Poetarum Graecorum (Crumbs of the Ancient Greek Poets). The manuscript itself had frequently changed its quarters. In 1623, having been taken in the sack of Heidelberg in the Thirty Years' War, it was sent with the rest of the Palatine Library to Rome as a present from Maximilian I of Bavaria to Pope Gregory XV, who had it divided into two parts, the first of which was by far the larger; thence it was taken to Paris in 1797. In 1816 it went back to Heidelberg, but in an incomplete state, the second part remaining at Paris. It is now represented at Heidelberg by a photographic facsimile.[4]
Brunck's edition was superseded by the standard one of Friedrich Jacobs (1794–1814, 13 vols.), the text of which was reprinted in a more convenient form in 1813–1817, and occupies three pocket volumes in the Tauchnitz series of the classics. The best edition for general purposes is perhaps that of Dubner in Didot's Bibliotheca (1864–1872), which contains the Palatine Anthology, the epigrams of the Planudean Anthology not collected in the former, an appendix of pieces derived from other sources, copious notes, a literal Latin prose translation by Jean François Boissonade, Bothe, and Lapaume and the metrical Latin versions of Hugo Grotius. A third volume, edited by E. Cougny, was published in 1890. The best edition of the Planudean Anthology is the splendid one by van Bosch and van Lennep (1795–1822). There is also an incomplete edition of the text by Hugo Stadtmüller in the Teubner series, 3 vols.,[5] which stops at IX 563 due to Stadtmüller's death. More recent editions are one in the Collection des Universités de France series, 13 vols., started by Pierre Waltz and continued by other scholars, and one edited by Hermann Beckby, 4 vols., in the Tusculum series. The most recent edition is by Fabrizio Conca, Mario Marzi and Giuseppe Zanetto, with the cooperation in vol. I of Carla Castelli, 3 vols., published by UTET.
Arrangement
The Palatine MS., the archetype of the present text, was transcribed by different persons at different times, and the actual arrangement of the collection does not correspond with that signalized in the index. It is arranged into the following books:[5]
The prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias to their respective collections;
Amatory epigrams;
Votive inscriptions;
Epitaphs;
The epigrams of Gregory of Nazianzus;
Rhetorical and illustrative epigrams;
Ethical pieces;
Humorous and convivial;
Strato's Musa Puerilis;
Metrical curiosities;
Puzzles, enigmas, oracles;
Miscellanies.
The epigrams on works of art, as already stated, are missing from the Codex Palatinus, and must be sought in an appendix of epigrams only occurring in the Planudean Anthology. The epigrams hitherto recovered from ancient monuments and similar sources form appendices in the second and third volumes of Dübner's edition. The Liddell Scott Greek Lexicon divides the Anthologia Graeca sources into Anthologia Palatina, Planudea (1864-1968), then Appendix nova epigrammatum (1890 onward).[6]
Style
The poems in the anthology represent different periods. Four stages may be indicated:
The Hellenic proper, of which Simonides of Ceos (c. 556 – 469BC), the author of most of the sepulchral inscriptions on those who fell in the Persian wars, is representative. Nearly all the pieces of this era are actual inscriptions or addresses to real personages, whether living or deceased.
The epigram received a great development in its second or Alexandrian era, when its range was extended to include anecdote, satire, and amorous longing; when epitaphs and votive inscriptions were composed on imaginary persons and things. The modification has a representative in Leonidas of Tarentum, a contemporary of Pyrrhus of Epirus, and closes with Antipater of Sidon, about 140BC (or later). Callimachus, one of the Alexandrian poets, affects stern simplicity in his epigrams.
Meleager of Gadara was a Syrian; his pieces are usually erotic, with far-fetched conceits. His gaiety and licentiousness are imitated and exaggerated by his somewhat later contemporary, the Epicurean Philodemus, and his fancy reappears in Philodemus's contemporary, Zonas, in Crinagoras of Mytilene, who wrote under Augustus, and in Marcus Argentarius, of uncertain date. At a later period of the empire another genre, was developed, the satirical. Lucillus of Tarrha, who flourished under Nero, and Lucian, display a talent for shrewd, caustic epigram. The same style obtains with Palladas, an Alexandrian grammarian of the 4th century, the last of the strictly classical epigrammatists. His literary position is that of an indignant but despairing opponent of Christianity.
The fourth or Byzantine style of epigrammatic composition was cultivated at the court of Justinian. The diction of Agathias and his compeers is ornate.[5]
Translations and imitations
Latin renderings of select epigrams by Hugo Grotius were published in Bosch and Lennep's edition of the Planudean Anthology, in the Didot edition, and in Henry Wellesley's Anthologia Polyglotta. Imitations in modern languages have been copious, actual translations less common. F. D. Dehèque's 1863 translation was in French prose. The German language admits of the preservation of the original metre, a circumstance exploited by Johann Gottfried Herder and Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs.[7]
In 1849 Henry Wellesley, principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford, published his Anthologia Polyglotta, a collection of the translations and imitations in all languages, with the original text. In this appeared versions by Goldwin Smith and Merivale, which, with the other English renderings extant at the time, accompany the literal prose translation of the Public School Selections, executed by the Rev. George Burges for Bohn's Classical Library (1854).[7]
W. R. Paton, Anthologiae Graecae Erotica: The Love Epigrams or Book V of the Palatine Anthology (edited, and partly rendered into English verse, London, 1898)
A small volume on the Anthology, edited and with some original translations by Lord Neaves, is one of W. Lucas Collins's series Ancient Classics for Modern Readers, The Greek Anthology (Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1874)
Two critical contributions to the subject are the Rev. James Davies's essay on Epigrams in the Quarterly Review (vol. cxvii.), illustrating the distinction between Greek and Latin epigram; and the disquisition in J. A. Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets (1873; 3rd ed., 1893).
List of poets to whom epigrams are attributed in the Greek Anthology
↑ "The Greek Anthology with an English Translation". ΕΤΑΝΑ (Electronic Tools and Ancient Near East Archives. Retrieved September 2, 2011.: Explanatory text for the book of W. R. Paton entitled "The Greek Anthology with an English Translation" (1916), the same text is also at the introduction in page http://www.ancientlibrary.com/greek-anthology/ before the facsimile copy of the pages of the same book
↑ Liddell Scott Greek Lexicon "(Names of epigrammatists, where found in codd., are added in brackets.) Anthologia Palatina, Planudea, ed. F. Dübner, Paris (D.) 1864–72; ed. H. Stadtmüller, vols. i, ii (1), iii (1) (all published), Leipzig (T.) 1894–1906, H. Beckby, Munich [1965–8]2 (4 vols.; I–XV = Anthologia Palatina, XVI = Appendix Planudea) [AP, APl.] Appendix nova epigrammatum, ed. E. Cougny, Paris (D.) 1890. [App.Anth.]; A. S. F. Gow, D. L. Page, The Greek Anthology 1: Hellenistic Epigrams, Cambridge 1965 (2 vols.) [HE .. G.-P.]; 2: The Garland of Philip and Some Contemporary Epigrams, Cambridge 1968 [Garl. .. G.-P.]; Epigrammata Graeca, D. L. Page, OCT 1975 [EG .. P.]; Further Greek Epigrams. Epigrams before A.D. 50 from the Greek Anthology and Other Sources, D. L. Page (revised by R. D. Dawe, J. Diggle), Cambridge 1981 [FGE .. P.]; Sch.AP = Scholia ad epigrammata arithmetica in Anthologia Graeca (scholia recentiora), in Diophanti Alexandri opera omnia, P. Tannery, vol. 2 Teubner (Leipzig) 1895 [(S) 1974]."
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word derives from the Greek ἐπίγραμμα. This literary device has been practiced for over two millennia.
Agathias Scholasticus was a Greek poet and the principal historian of part of the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I between 552 and 558.
Nonnus of Panopolis was the most notable Greek epic poet of the Imperial Roman era. He was a native of Panopolis (Akhmim) in the Egyptian Thebaid and probably lived in the 5th century CE. He is known as the composer of the Dionysiaca, an epic tale of the god Dionysus, and of the Metabole, a paraphrase of the Gospel of John. The epic Dionysiaca describes the life of Dionysus, his expedition to India, and his triumphant return. It was written in Homeric Greek and in dactylic hexameter, and it consists of 48 books at 20,426 lines.
Palladas was a Greek poet, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt.
Maximus Planudes was a Byzantine Greek monk, scholar, anthologist, translator, mathematician, grammarian and theologian at Constantinople. Through his translations from Latin into Greek and from Greek into Latin, he brought the Greek East and the Latin West into closer contact with one another. He is now best known as a compiler of the Greek Anthology.
Anyte of Tegea was a Hellenistic poet from Tegea in Arcadia. Little is known of her life, but twenty-four epigrams attributed to her are preserved in the Greek Anthology, and one is quoted by Julius Pollux; nineteen of these are generally accepted as authentic. She introduced rural themes to the genre, which became a standard theme in Hellenistic epigrams. She is one of the nine outstanding ancient women poets listed by Antipater of Thessalonica in the Palatine Anthology. Her pastoral poetry may have influenced Theocritus, and her works were adapted by several later poets, including Ovid.
Straton of Sardis was a Greek poet and anthologist from the Lydian city of Sardis.
Meleager of Gadara was a poet and collector of epigrams. He wrote some satirical prose, now lost, and some sensual poetry, of which 134 epigrams survive.
Alan Douglas Edward Cameron, was a British classicist and academic. He was Charles Anthon Professor Emeritus of the Latin Language and Literature at Columbia University, New York. He was one of the leading scholars of the literature and history of the later Roman world and at the same time a wide-ranging classical philologist whose work encompassed above all the Greek and Latin poetic tradition from Hellenistic to Byzantine times but also aspects of late antique art.
The Latin Anthology is a compilation of Latin verses from the era of Ennius up to around 1000 AD. This collection was mainly compiled by Pieter Burmann the Younger.
Paul the Silentiary, also known as Paulus Silentiarius, was a Greek Byzantine poet and courtier to the emperor Justinian at Constantinople.
The Palatine Anthology, sometimes abbreviated AP, is the collection of Greek poems and epigrams discovered in 1606 in the Palatine Library in Heidelberg. It is based on the lost collection of Constantine Kephalas of the 10th century, which in turn is based on older anthologies. It contains material from the 7th century BC until 600 AD and later on was the main part of the Greek Anthology which also included the Anthology of Planudes and more material.
Philippus of Thessalonica or Philippus Epigrammaticus was the compiler of an Anthology of Epigrammatists subsequent to Meleager of Gadara and is himself the author of 72 epigrams in the Greek Anthology. Philippus has one word which describes the epigram by a single quality; he calls his work an oligostikhia or collection of poems not exceeding a few lines in length. Philippus' own epigrams, of which over seventy are extant, are generally rather dull, chiefly school exercises, and, in the phrase of Jacobs, imitatione magis quam inventione conspicua. But we owe to him the preservation of a large mass of work belonging to the Roman period.
Epigonus of Thessalonica is an epigrammatist quoted in the Greek Anthology. Both the Palatine and Planudean codices attribute AP 9.261, an epigram on an ageing vine, to Epigonus; the Planudean codex attributes two more poems to him.
Antiphanes of Macedon is the author of ten epigrams in the Greek Anthology; one of these is headed as Antiphanes of Megalopolis and may be by another poet.
Hedylus was a Greek epigrammatic poet of the Hellenistic period.
Rufinus was a Greek epigrammatist of the Roman era.
The Anthology of Planudes, is an anthology of Greek epigrams and poems compiled by Maximus Planudes, a Byzantine grammarian and theologian, based on the Anthology of Cephalas. It comprises 2,400 epigrams.
Syllogae minores is a term used in literature to describe small collections of Greek epigrams, which are part of the so-called Greek Anthology, the collection of Greek epigrams. The term "Syllogae" comes from the Greek word "Συλλογαί" (collections), while the term "minores" (minor) is used to distinguish them from the large and important collections of Palatine Anthology and the Anthology of Planudes. Some of these collections are important because of the epigrams which contain some not found in any of the other collections, while others are highly dependent on known sources, mainly of the Anthology of Planudes.
anthologiagraeca.org Texts, scholia, images of the codex, translations in English, French & other languages. sources A Collaborative Edition by the Canada Research Chair in Digital Textualities.
Maximus PlanudesArchived 2005-12-18 at the Wayback Machine from William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1867), v. 3, pp.384–390; includes a detailed "Literary History of the Greek Anthology"
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