Greek Anthology
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.
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.
[3] 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 (Στέφανος); in an introductory poem each poet is compared to some flower, fancifully deemed appropriate to his genius.
[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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
