Besides his great Anthology, another, of the same class of contents as that subsequently made by Strato, is often ascribed to Meleager, an epigram in Strato's Anthology[12] being regarded as the proem to this supposed collection. But there is no external authority whatever for this hypothesis; nor is it necessary to regard this epigram as anything more than a poem commemorating the boys mentioned in it. Eros, not Meleager, is in this case the weaver of the garland.
The next compiler of an Anthology, more than a century after Meleager, was Philippus of Thessalonica. Of this also the proem is preserved.[13] It purports to be a collection of the epigrammatists since Meleager, and is dedicated to the Roman patron of the author, one Camillus. The proem runs thus:
"Having plucked for thee Heliconian flowers, and cut the first-blown blossoms of famous-forested Pieria, and reaped the ears from modern pages, I wove a rival garland, to be like those of Meleager; but do thou, noble Cantillus, who knowest the fame of the older poets, know likewise the short pieces of the younger. Antipater's corn-ear shall grace our garland, and Crinagoras like an ivy-cluster; Antiphilus shall glow like a grape-bunch, Tullius like melilote, Philodemus like marjoram: and Parmenio myrtle-berries: Antiphanes as a rose: Automedon ivy, Zonas lilies, Bianor oak, Antigonus olive, and Diodorus violet. Liken thou Euenus to laurel, and the multitude woven in with these to what fresh-blown flowers thou wilt."
One sees here the decline of the art from its first exquisiteness. There is no selection or appropriateness in the names of the flowers chosen, and the verse is managed baldly and clumsily. Philippus' own epigrams, of which over seventy are extant, are generally rather dull, chiefly school exercises, and, in the phrase of Jacobs, /imitatione magis quam inventione conspicua/. But we owe to him the preservation of a large mass of work belonging to the Roman period. The date of Philippus cannot be fixed very precisely. His own epigrams contain no certain allusion to any date other than the reign of Augustus. Of the poets named in his proem, Antiphanes, Euenus, Parmenio, and Tullius have no date determinable from internal evidence. Antigonus has been sometimes identified with Antigonus of Carystus, the author of the {Paradokon Sunagoge}, who lived in the third century B.C. under Ptolemy Philadelphus or Ptolemy Euergetes; but as this Anthology distinctly professes to be of poets since Meleager, he must be another author of the same name. Antipater of Thessalonica, Bianor, and Diodorus are of the Augustan period; Philodemus, Zonas, and probably Automedon, of the period immediately preceding it. The latest certain allusion in the poems of Antiphilus is to the enfranchisement of Rhodes by Nero in A.D. 53.[14] One of the epigrams under the name of Automedon in the Anthology[15] is on the rhetorician Nicetas, the teacher of the younger Pliny. But there are at least two poets of the name, Automedon of Aetolia and Automedon of Cyzicus, and the former, who is pre-Roman, may be the one included by Philippus. If so, we need not, with Jacobs, date this collection in the reign of Trajan, at the beginning of the second century, but may place it with greater probability half a century earlier, under Nero.
In the reign of Hadrian the grammarian Diogenianus of Heraclea edited an Anthology of epigrams,[16] but nothing is known of it beyond the name. The Anthology contains a good deal of work which may be referred to this period.
The first of the appendices to the Palatine Anthology is the {Paidike Mousa} of Strato of Sardis. The compiler apologises in a prefatory note for including it, excusing himself with the line of Euripides,[17] {e ge sopsron ou diapstharesetai}. It was a new Anthology of epigrams dealing with this special subject from the earliest period downwards. As we possess it, Strato's collection includes thirteen of the poets named in the Garland of Meleager (including Meleager himself), two of those named in the Garland of Philippus, and ten other poets, none of them of much mark, and most of unknown date; the most interesting being Alpheus of Mitylene, who from the style and contents of his epigrams seems to have lived about the time of Hadrian, but may possibly be an Augustan poet. Strato is mentioned by Diogenes Laërtius,[18] who wrote at the beginning of the third century; and his own epigram on the physician Artemidorus Capito,[19] who was a contemporary of Hadrian, fixes his approximate date.
How far we possess Strato's collection in its original form it is impossible to decide. Jacobs says he cannot attempt to determine whether Cephalas took it in a lump or made a selection from it, or whether he kept the order of the epigrams. As they stand they have no ascertainable principle of arrangement, alphabetical or of author or of subject. The collection consists of two hundred and fifty-nine epigrams, of which ninety-four are by Strato himself and sixty by Meleager. It has either been carelessly formed, or suffered from interpolation afterwards. Some of the epigrams are foreign to the subject of the collection. Six are on women;[20] and four of these are on women whose names end in the diminutive form, Phanion, Callistion, etc., which suggests the inference that they were inserted at a late date and by an ignorant transcriber who confused these with masculine forms. For all the epigrams of Strato's collection the Anthology is the only source.
In the three hundred years between Strato and Agathias no new
Anthology is known to have been made.
The celebrated Byzantine poet and historian Agathias, son of Mamnonius of Myrina, came to Constantinople as a young man to study law in the year 554. In the preface to his History he tells us that he formed a new collection of recent and contemporary epigrams previously unpublished,[21] in seven books, entitled {Kuklos}. His proem to the Cyclus is extant.[22] It consists of forty-six iambics followed by eighty-seven hexameters, and describes the collection under the symbolism no longer of a flower-garden, but of a feast to which different persons bring contributions ({ou stepsanos alla sunagoge}), a metaphor which is followed out with unrelenting tediousness. The piece is not worth transcription here. He says he includes his own epigrams. After a panegyric on the greatness of the empire of Justinian, and the foreign and domestic peace of his reign, he ends by describing the contents of the collection. Book I. contains dedications in the ancient manner, {os proterois makaressin aneimena}: for Agathias was himself a Christian, and indeed the old religion had completely died out even before Justinian closed the schools of Athens. Book II. contains epigrams on statues, pictures, and other works of art; Book III., sepulchral epigrams; Book IV., epigrams "on the manifold paths of life, and the unstable scales of fortune," corresponding to the section of {Protreptika} in the Palatine Anthology; Book V., irrisory epigrams; Book VI. amatory epigrams; and Book VII., convivial epigrams. Agathias, so far as we know, was the first who made this sort of arrangement under subjects, which, with modifications, has generally been followed afterwards. His Anthology is lost; and probably perished soon after that of Cephalas was made.
Constantinus Cephalas, a grammarian unknown except from the Palatine MS., began again from the beginning. The scholiast to the Garland of Meleager in that MS., after saying that Meleager's Anthology was arranged in alphabetical order, goes on as follows:—"but Constantinus, called Cephalas, broke it up, and distributed it under different heads, viz., the love-poems separately, and the dedications and epitaphs, and epideictic pieces, as they are now arranged below in this book."[23] We must assume that with this rearranged Anthology he incorporated those of Philippus and Agathias, unless, which is not probable, we suppose that the Palatine Anthology is one enlarged from that of Cephalas by some one else completely unknown.