Greek Anthology


The Greek Anthology is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that span the Classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of the material of the Greek Anthology comes from two manuscripts, the Palatine Anthology of the 10th century and the Anthology of Planudes of the 14th century.
While papyri containing fragments of collections of poetry have been found in Egypt, the earliest known anthology in Greek was compiled by Meleager of Gadara in the first century BC, 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 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.
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—less, however, as the vehicle of personal feeling than as the recognized commemoration of remarkable individuals or events, on sepulchral monuments and votive offerings: Such compositions were termed epigrams, i.e. inscriptions. The modern use of the word is a departure from the original sense, which simply indicated that the composition was intended to be engraved or inscribed.
Such a composition must necessarily be brief, and the restraints attendant upon its publication concurred with the simplicity of Greek taste in prescribing conciseness of expression, pregnancy of meaning, purity of diction and singleness of thought, as the indispensable conditions of excellence in the epigrammatic style. The term was soon extended to any piece by which these conditions were fulfilled.
The transition from the monumental to the purely literary character of the epigram was favoured by the exhaustion of more lofty forms of poetry, the general increase, from the general diffusion of culture, of accomplished writers and tasteful readers, but, above all, by the changed political circumstances of the times, which induced many who would otherwise have engaged in public affairs to addict themselves to literary pursuits. These causes came into full operation during the Alexandrian era, in which we find every description of epigrammatic composition perfectly developed.
About 60 BC, 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 ; 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.
In the age of the emperor Tiberius 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, and Straton of Sardis compiled his elegant Μουσα Παιδικη 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 ; it was the first to be divided into books, and arranged with reference to the subjects of the pieces.
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 temporary revival of letters 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, to which we shall have to recur, is founded on a principle of classification, and nearly corresponds to that adopted by Agathias. His principle of selection is unknown; it is only certain that while he omitted much that he should have retained, he has preserved much that would otherwise have perished.
The extent of our obligations may be ascertained by a comparison between his anthology and that of the next editor, the monk Maximus Planudes, who has not merely grievously mutilated the anthology of Cephalas by omissions, but has disfigured it by interpolating verses of his own. We are, however, indebted to him for the preservation of the epigrams on works of art, which seem to have been accidentally omitted from our only transcript of Cephalas.
The Planudean Anthology 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 in 1606, it was not published until 1776, when it was included in Brunck's Analecta Veterum Poetarum Graecorum.
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.
Brunck's edition was superseded by the standard one of Friedrich Jacobs, 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, 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 selected from all quarters, 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 . There is also an incomplete edition of the text by Hugo Stadtmüller in the Teubner series, 3 vols., 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, 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 as follows: Book 1. Christian epigrams; 2. Christodorus's description of certain statues; 3. Inscriptions in the temple at Cyzicus; 4. The prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias to their respective collections; 5. Amatory epigrams; 6. Votive inscriptions; 7. Epitaphs; 8. The epigrams of Gregory of Nazianzus; 9. Rhetorical and illustrative epigrams; 10. Ethical pieces; 11. Humorous and convivial; 12. Strato's Musa Puerilis; 13. Metrical curiosities; 14. Puzzles, enigmas, oracles; 15. 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, then Appendix nova epigrammatum.

Style

The poems in the anthology represent different periods. Four stages may be indicated:
  1. The Hellenic proper, of which Simonides of Ceos, 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.
  2. 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 140 BC. Callimachus, one of the Alexandrian poets, affects stern simplicity in his epigrams.
  3. 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.
  4. The fourth or Byzantine style of epigrammatic composition was cultivated at the court of Justinian. The diction of Agathias and his compeers is ornate.

    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.
Robert Bland, John Herman Merivale, and their associates, produced efforts that are often diffuse. Francis Wrangham's versions are more spirited; and John Sterling translated the inscriptions of Simonides. John Wilson in Blackwood's Magazine 1833–1835, collected and commented on the labours of these and other translators, including indifferent attempts of William Hay.
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.
In 1864 Major R. G. Macgregor published an almost complete but mediocre translation of the Anthology. Idylls and Epigrams, by Richard Garnett, includes about 140 translations or imitations, with some original compositions in the same style.
Further translations are:
A small volume on the Anthology, by Lord Neaves, is one of Collins's series of Ancient Classics for Modern Readers.
Two critical contributions to the subject are the Rev. James Davies's essay on Epigrams in the Quarterly Review, illustrating the distinction between Greek and Latin epigram; and the disquisition in J. A. Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets.

List of poets to whom epigrams are attributed in the Greek Anthology