The Greek Anthology (Paton)/Volume I/Preface

PREFACE

The Palatine Anthology, so called because it is contained only in the unique manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg, was composed in the tenth century by Constantine Cephalas. He drew chiefly from three older Anthologies of widely different date : (1) the Stephanus, or Wreath, of Meleager, collected in the beginning of the first century B.C. by this master of the elegiac epigram and comprising all that is most worthy of preservation in these pages. Meleager was a quite unique personality in his own age, and his collection comprises no poems (as far as we know) of that age, except his own.^[1] It consists of poems of the seventh to third centuries B.C., i.e. of all the great or classical period of Greek literature. (2) The Stephanus of Philippus, made probably in the reign of Augustus. The spirit of poesy had in the interval descended on Italy, rather than on Greece, and here the most Roman poets, such as Crinagoras of Mytilene, are those who please the most. (3) The Cycle of Agathias, made in the age of Justinian and comprising strictly contemporary work. There is much tenderness and beauty in many of the poems, but the writers wrote in a language which they did not command, but by which they were commanded, as all who try to write ancient Greek are.

Cephalas included also in addition to the poems drawn from these main sources : (1) a certain number of epigrams derived from well-known authors and a few copied from stones; (2) the Musa Puerilis of Strato (Book XII), a collection on a special subject made at an uncertain date^[2]; (3) a collection of Love poems largely by Rufinus (beginning of Book V); (1) the epigrams of the Alexandrian Palladas (fifth century A.D.).^[3] At the beginning of each book (from Book V onwards) I try to indicate what is certainly due to each source. In Book IV will be found the proems of the three chief sources that I mention above. Books I-III explain themselves. In the twelfth or thirteenth century, a scholar of astounding industry, Maximus Planudes, to whom learning owes a heavy debt, rearranged and revised the work of Cephalas and to him alone we owe the preservation of the epigrams have printed as an appendix (Book XVI), derived, no doubt, chiefly from a now lost book of Cephalas' Anthology containing epigrams on works of art. It may be a matter of dispute among scholars, but I do not believe myself that he had any text before him which was better than, or independent of, the tradition of the Palatine Manuscript. I therefore always follow, as strictly as possible, this tradition.

In Smith's Biographical Dictionary, under Planudes, a good account is given of the history of the Anthology, and readers may consult this. A still better and more recent account is Mr. Mackail's in the Introduction to his Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology.

A word should, perhaps, be said as to the arrangement of the epigrams in the three principal sources. Agathias in his proem gives us his own classification of the Epigrams: (1) Dedicatory, (2) On Works of Art, (3) Sepulchral, (4) Declamatory (?), (5) Satirical, (6) Amatory, (7) Convivial; i.e. the same classification as that of Cephalas, but not in the same order. The Scholiast of the Palatine MS. tells us that Meleager's Wreath was not arranged under subjects at all but alphabetically (i.e. in the alphabetical order of the first letters of the poems), and we know that Philippus' Wreath was so arranged, as all the longer fragments of it retain this order. Curiously enough there are very few traces of such an order in the fragments of Meleager's Wreath, none in the present volume. This is a fact I will not attempt to explain.

I would beg any possible, but improbable, reader who desires to peruse the Anthology as a whole, to read first the epigrams of Meleager's Stephanus, then those of that of Philippus, and finally the Byzantine poems. In the intervals the iron hand of History had entirely recast and changed the spirit and the language of Greece, and much misunderstanding has been caused by people quoting anything from the "Greek Anthology" as specifically "Greek." We have to deal with three ages almost as widely separated as the Roman conquest, the Saxon conquest, and the Norman conquest of England. It is true that the poems of all the epochs are written in a language that professes to be one, but this is only due to the consciousness of the learned Greeks, a consciousness we still respect in them to-day, that the glorious language of old Greece is their imperishable heritage, a heritage that the corruption of the ages should not be permitted to defile.

As regards the Greek text in Books I-VII and IX, which had the advantage of being edited by Stadtmüller (the Teubner text), I do not give the sources of such changes from the long standard text of Dübner (the Didot text) as I think fit to make, except in cases where these sources are subsequent to Stadtmüller's edition, in which all conjectures previously made are cited and in which full information is given about the tradition. This work of his life was cut short by his lamented death, and in the remaining books, though through the kindness of the Loeb Library I have the advantage of consulting the facsimile of the Palatine MS., I shall not have that of his learned aid.

W. R. PATON.

1. Antipater of Sidon is however his contemporary.
2. For the sources of this book and also of the satirical epigrams of Book XI see the special prefaces to these books.
3. Some at least of these seem to have been incorporated by Agathias in his Cycle. It is not necessary to mention here matter included in the Palatine MS. but not reproduced in the printed texts.