The Greek Anthology

The Greek Anthology is a collection of poems written in Ancient Greek, almost all of them epigrams. It was compiled in the tenth century by Constantinus Cephalas, one of the many scholars who worked in Byzantium (modern Constantinople), under the patronage of the learned emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (912-959 CE), to preserve the literature and other remains of Classical Antiquity. The Greek Anthology is also known as the Palatine Anthology because the only extant manuscript of the anthology was discovered in the Palatine Library at Heidelberg in Germany.

In compiling his anthology Constantinus Cephalas drew on three earlier anthologies:

• the Garland (στέφανος, stephanos) of Meleager, compiled around 90 BCE by the Greek poet and philosopher Meleager (140-70 BCE), a selection of poems from the seventh century to Meleager's own time;

• the Garland of Philippus, compiled around 40 CE by Philippus, a Greek speech-writer living in Rome, a selection of poems from the time of Meleager to Philippus' own time;

• the Cycle or Collection (κύκλος, kuklos) of Agathias, compiled around 570 CE by Agathias Scholasticus (536-582 CE), a Greek lawyer practising in Byzantium, and containing large parts of the Garlands of Meleager and Philippus as well as many epigrams by Agathias himself and his contemporaries.

In compiling his anthology Cephalas not only reorganised the material contained in these three anthologies but added new material. The anthology is divided into 15 books, all but two of which are devoted to epigrams. Book II contains a series of poems describing the statues in a public gymnasium in Byzantium, and Book IV contains the poems with which Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias prefaced their anthologies. The remaining books contain altogether several thousand epigrams arranged according to subject matter.

The English word 'anthology' comes from the Greek word ἀνθολογία (anthologia), which means 'flower-gathering' or 'bouquet of flowers' and was first used of a collection of poems, i.e., an anthology in our sense of the word, in the Byzantine period.

See further anthology.