Greek Anthology

Greek Anthology, collection of about 3,700 Greek epigrams, songs, epitaphs, and rhetorical exercises, mostly in elegiac couplets, that can be dated from as early as the 7th century bce to as late as 1000 ce. The nucleus of the Anthology is a collection made early in the 1st century bce by Meleager, who called it Stephanos (Greek: “Crown,” or “Collection of Flowers”); he introduced it with a poem comparing each writer in the collection to a flower. In the late 9th century ce, Constantinus Cephalas joined Meleager’s collection to those of Philippus of Thessalonica (1st century ce), Diogenianus (2nd century ce), Agathias (6th century ce), and others. In the 10th century the Cephalas collection was revised and augmented. This revision forms the first 15 books of the Anthology, preserved in the Palatine Anthology, a manuscript discovered at Heidelberg, Germany. The 16th book is made up of poems culled from another, shorter manuscript version of Cephalas’s collection (the Planudean manuscript, or Planudean Anthology) and compiled by Maximus Planudes in 1301. Modern scholarship has attempted to detail the relationships between the Palatine and Planudean anthologies and surviving manuscripts that include the same and similar—and, in some cases, unique—content. Because of a lack of conclusive evidence, however, scholars have drawn differing conclusions about these relationships.

The literary value of the Anthology lies in the distinction and charm of perhaps one-sixth of the whole. For the rest, it preserves a good deal that is of historical interest; it illustrates the continuity of Greek literature for almost 2,000 years, because the latest inclusions in it are, in language, style, and feeling, not too different from the earliest inclusions. The Anthology also had a persistent and considerable influence on later literature.