A patristic anthology, commonly called a florilegium, is a systematic collections of excerpts (more or less copious) from the works of the Church Fathers and other ecclesiastical writers of the early period, compiled with a view to serve dogmatic or ethical purposes.
These encyclopedic compilations are a characteristic product of the later Byzantine theological school, and form a very considerable branch of the extensive literature of the Greek Catenæ.
The oldest extant, and at the same time most extensive and valuable, of these dogmatic compilations, is the Antiquorum Patrum doctrino de Verbi incarnatione.
Another compilation of this kind, entitled Περὶ τῆς ἐξ ἀρχῆς καὶ μέχρι τέλους οἰκονομίας τοῦ θεοῦ, εἰς τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἱστορία ἐπωφελής· καὶ περὶ τῆς χριστιανικῆς πολιτείας, ὅπως συνέστη· καὶ κατὰ πάντων τῶν αἱρετικῶν or simply De Oeconomia Dei covering the whole province of theology in five separate books, is ascribed to the twelfth-century monk Nilus Doxopatres, related to but certainly not identical with the eleventh-century John Doxopatres; the first two books, treating respectively of Adam and Christ, are all that remain.
Their material, as a rule, is gathered indiscriminately from various authorities, though in some instances it is furnished by only a single writer, a distinct preference being then shown for the works of the more illustrious Fathers, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom.
That the Damascene was really the compiler of the "Sacra Parallela", and that he used as his principal source the "Capita theologica", a florilegium of Maximus Confessor, has been maintained firmly (against Friedrich Loofs, Paul Wendland, and Jonas Cohn) by Karl Holl.
[6] Though tà ‘ierá is no longer extant in its original form, considerable portions of the first two books have come down to us in manuscript, and parts of the third are preserved in "The Bee" (Melissa) of Antonius, a Greek monk of the eleventh century.