Propertius
Sextus Propertius was a Latin elegiac poet of the Augustan age. He was born around 50–45 BC in Assisium and died shortly after 15 BC. Propertius' surviving work comprises four books of Elegies, he was a friend of the poets Gallus and Virgil and, with them, had as his patron Maecenas and, through Maecenas, the emperor Augustus. Although Propertius was not as renowned in his own time as other Latin elegists, he is today regarded by scholars as a major poet. Little information is known about Propertius outside of his own writing, his praenomen "Sextus" is mentioned by Aelius Donatus, a few manuscripts list him as "Sextus Propertius", but the rest of his name is unknown. From numerous references in his poetry it is clear he was raised in Umbria, his birthplace is regarded as modern Assisi, where tourists can view the excavated remains of a house thought to have belonged at least to the poet's family, if not to the poet himself. During Propertius' childhood, his father died and the family lost land as part of a confiscation the same one which reduced Virgil's estates when Octavian allotted lands to his veterans in 41 BC.
Along with cryptic references in Ovid that imply that he was younger than his contemporary Tibullus, this suggests a birthdate after 55 BC. After his father's death, Propertius' mother set him on course for a public career, indicating his family still had some wealth, while the abundance of obscure mythology present in his poetry indicates he received a good education. Frequent mention of friends like Tullus, the nephew of Lucius Volcatius Tullus, consul in 33 BC, plus the fact that he lived on Rome's Esquiline Hill indicate he moved among the children of the rich and politically connected during the early part of the 20s BC, it was during this time that he met Cynthia, the older woman who would inspire him to express his poetic genius. Propertius published a first book of love elegies with Cynthia herself as the main theme; the Monobiblos must have attracted the attention of Maecenas, a patron of the arts who took Propertius into his circle of court poets. A second, larger book of elegies was published a year one that includes poems addressed directly to his patron and praises for Augustus.
The 19th century classics scholar Karl Lachmann argued, based on the unusually large number of poems in this book and Propertius' mention of tres libelli, that the single Book II comprises two separate books of poetry conflated in the manuscript tradition, an idea supported by the state of the manuscript tradition of "Book II." An editor of Propertius, Paul Fedeli, accepts this hypothesis, as does G. P. Goold, editor of the Loeb edition; the publication of a third book came sometime after 23 BC. Its content shows the poet beginning to move beyond simple love themes, as some poems use Amor as a starting point for other topics; the book shows the poet growing tired of the demanding yet fickle Cynthia, implies a bitter end to their torrid love affair. Book IV, published sometime after 16 BC, displays more of the poet's ambitious agenda, includes several aetiological poems explaining the origin of various Roman rites and landmarks. Book IV, the last Propertius wrote, has only half the number of poems as Book I.
Given the change in direction apparent in his poetry, scholars assume only his death a short time after publication prevented him from further exploration. It is possible that Propertius had children, either with Cynthia or a liaison. An elegy of Ovid dated to 2 BC makes it clear. Propertius' fame rests on his four books of elegies. All his poems are written using the elegiac couplet, a form in vogue among the Roman social set during the late 1st century BC. Like the work of nearly all the elegists, Propertius' work is dominated by the figure of a single woman, one he refers to throughout his poetry by the pseudonym Cynthia, she is named in over half the elegies of the first book and appears indirectly in several others, right from the first word of the first poem in the Monobiblos: Apuleius identifies her as a woman named Hostia, Propertius suggests she is a descendant of the Roman poet Hostius. Scholars guess that she was a courtesan. Propertius compliments her as docta puella'learned girl', like Sulpicia, she herself was a writer of verse.
Their affair veers wildly between emotional extremes, as a lover she dominates his life at least through the publication of the third book: It is difficult to date many of Propertius' poems, but they chronicle the kind of declarations, jealousies and lamentations that were commonplace subjects among the Latin elegists. The last two poems in Book III seem to indicate a final break with her, Cynthia died some time before the publication of the final book IV. In this last book Cynthia is the subject of only two poems, best regarded as a postscript; the bi-polar complexity of the relationship is amply demonstrated in a poignant, if amusing, poem from the final book. Cynthia's ghost addresses Propertius from beyond the grave with criticism that her funeral was not lavish enough, yet the longing of the poet remains in the final line inter complexus excidit umbra meos. - "Her shade slipped away from my embrace."Book IV indicates Propertius was planning a new direction for h
Oxyrhynchus
Oxyrhynchus is a city in Middle Egypt located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo in Minya Governorate. It is an archaeological site, considered one of the most important discovered. For the past century, the area around Oxyrhynchus has been continually excavated, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts dating from the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt. Among the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus are plays of Menander, fragments from the Gospel of Thomas, fragments from Euclid's Elements, they include a few vellum manuscripts, more recent Arabic manuscripts on paper. Oxyrhynchus lies west of the main course of the Nile on the Bahr Yussef, a branch that terminates in Lake Moeris and the Faiyum oasis. In ancient Egyptian times, there was a city on the site called Per-Medjed, named after the medjed, a species of elephantfish of the Nile worshipped there as the fish that ate the penis of Osiris, it was the capital of the 19th Upper Egyptian Nome. After the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, the city was reestablished as a Hellenistic town called Oxyrrhynchoupolis.
In the Hellenistic period, Oxyrhynchus was a prosperous regional capital, the third-largest city in Egypt. After Egypt was Christianized, it became famous for its many monasteries. Oxyrhynchus remained a prominent, though declining, town in the Roman and Byzantine periods. From 619 to 629, during the brief period of Sasanian Egypt, three Greek papyri from Oxyrhynchus include references to large sums of gold that were to be sent to the emperor. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641, the canal system on which the town depended fell into disrepair, Oxyrhynchus was abandoned. Today the town of el Bahnasa occupies part of the ancient site. Bahnasa is known for having 5,000 Sahaba buried in it following several major battles against the Roman army and fortifications. For more than 1000 years, the inhabitants of Bahnasa dumped garbage at a series of sites out in the desert sands beyond the town limits; the fact that the town was built on a canal rather than on the Nile itself was important, because this meant that the area did not flood every year with the rising of the river, as did the districts along the riverbank.
When the canals dried up, the water table never rose again. The area west of the Nile has no rain, so the garbage dumps of Oxyrhynchus were covered with sand and were forgotten for another 1000 years; because Egyptian society under the Greeks and Romans was governed bureaucratically, because Oxyrhynchus was the capital of the 19th nome, the material at the Oxyrhynchus dumps included vast amounts of papyri. Accounts, tax returns, census material, receipts, correspondence on administrative, religious and political matters and licenses of all kinds—all these were periodically cleaned out of government offices, put in wicker baskets, dumped out in the desert. Private citizens added their own piles of unwanted papyri; because papyrus was expensive, papyri were reused: a document might have farm accounts on one side, a student's text of Homer on the other. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, contained a complete record of the life of the town, of the civilizations and empires of which the town was a part; the town site of Oxyrhynchus itself has never been excavated, because the modern Egyptian town is built on top of it, but it is believed that the city had many public buildings, including a theatre with a capacity of 11,000 spectators, a hippodrome, four public baths, a gymnasium, two small ports on the Bahr Yussef.
It is likely that there were military buildings, such as barracks, since the city supported a military garrison on several occasions during the Roman and Byzantine periods. During the Greek and Roman periods, Oxyrhynchus had temples to Serapis, Zeus-Amun, Hera-Isis, Atargatis-Bethnnis and Osiris. There were Greek temples to Demeter, Dionysus and Apollo. In the Christian era, Oxyrhynchus was the seat of a bishopric, the modern town still has several ancient Coptic Christian churches; when Flinders Petrie visited Oxyrhynchus in 1922, he found remains of theatre. Now only part of a single column remains: everything else has been scavenged for building material for modern housing. In 1882, while still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, came under effective British rule, British archaeologists began the systematic exploration of the country; because Oxyrhynchus was not considered an Ancient Egyptian site of any importance, it was neglected until 1896, when two young excavators, Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt, both fellows of The Queen's College, began to excavate it.
"My first impressions on examining the site were not favourable," wrote Grenfell. "The rubbish mounds were nothing but rubbish mounds." However, they soon realized what they had found. The unique combination of climate and circumstance had left at Oxyrhynchus an unequalled archive of the ancient world. "The flow of papyri soon became a torrent," Grenfell recalled. "Merely turning up the soil with one's boot would disclose a layer."Being classically educated Englishmen and Hunt were interested in the possibility that Oxyrhynchus might reveal the lost masterpieces of classical Greek literature. They knew, for example, that the Constitution of Athens by Aristotle had been discovered on Egyptian papyrus in 1890; this hope inspired them and their successors to sift through the
Suda
The Suda or Souda is a large 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world attributed to an author called Soudas or Souidas. It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Greek, with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, derived from medieval Christian compilers; the derivation is from the Byzantine Greek word souda, meaning "fortress" or "stronghold", with the alternate name, stemming from an error made by Eustathius, who mistook the title for the author's name. The Suda is somewhere between an encyclopedia in the modern sense, it explains the source and meaning of words according to the philology of its period, using such earlier authorities as Harpocration and Helladios. It is a rich source of ancient and Byzantine history and life, although not every article is of equal quality, it is an "uncritical" compilation. Much of the work is interpolated, passages that refer to Michael Psellos are deemed interpolations which were added in copies.
This lexicon contains numerous biographical notices on political and literary figures of the Byzantine Empire to the tenth century, those biographical entries being condensations from the works of Hesychius of Miletus, as the author himself avers. Other sources were the encyclopedia of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus for the figures in ancient history, excerpts of John of Antioch for Roman history, the chronicle of Hamartolus for the Byzantine age; the biographies of Diogenes Laërtius, the works of Athenaeus and Philostratus. Other principal sources include a lexicon by "Eudemus," derived from the work On Rhetorical Language by Eudemus of Argos; the lexicon copiously draws from scholia to the classics, for writers, Josephus, the Chronicon Paschale, George Syncellus, George Hamartolus, so on. The Suda paraphrases these sources at length. Since many of the originals are lost, The Suda serves an invaluable repository of literary history, this preservation of the "literary history" is more vital than the lexicographical compilation itself, by some estimation.
The lexicon is arranged alphabetically with some slight deviations from common vowel order and place in the Greek alphabet according to a system called antistoichia. The order is: α, β, γ, δ, αι, ε, ζ, ει, η, ι, θ, κ, λ, μ, ν, ξ, ο, ω, π, ρ, σ, τ, οι, υ, φ, χ, ψIn addition, double letters are treated as single for the purposes of collation; the system is not difficult to learn and remember, but some editors—for example, Immanuel Bekker – rearranged the Suda alphabetically. Little is known about the author, named "Suidas" in its prefatory note, he lived in the second half of the 10th century, because the death of emperor John I Tzimiskes and his succession by Basil II and Constantine VIII are mentioned in the entry under "Adam", appended with a brief chronology of the world. At any rate, the work must have appeared by before the 12th century, since it is quoted from and alluded to by Eustathius who lived from about 1115 AD to about 1195 or 1196; the work deals with biblical as well as pagan subjects, from which it is inferred that the writer was a Christian.
The standard printed edition was compiled by Danish classical scholar Ada Adler in the first half of the twentieth century. A modern translation, the Suda On Line, was completed on 21 July 2014; the Suda has the Kitab al-Fehrest of Ibn al-Nadim. Compare the Latin Speculum Maius, authored in the 13th century by Vincent of Beauvais. Suidas. Gaisford, Thomas. Lexicon: post Ludolphum Kusterum ad codices manuscriptos. A - Theta. 1. Typographeo Academico. Volume 2, volume 3 Adler, Ada Suidae Lexicon. Reprinted 1967-71, Stuttgart. Citations Bibliography Index of the Suda on lineSuda On Line. An on-line edition of the Ada Adler edition with ongoing translations and commentary by registered editors. Suda lexicon at the Online Books Page Suda Lexicon in three volumes, Cambridge, 1705.
Elegy
In English literature, an elegy is a poem of serious reflection a lament for the dead. The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy notes: For all of its pervasiveness, the ‘elegy’ remains remarkably ill-defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, sometimes as a sign of a lament for the dead; the Greek term elegeia referred to any verse written in elegiac couplets and covering a wide range of subject matter. The term included epitaphs and mournful songs, commemorative verses; the Latin elegy of ancient Roman literature was most erotic or mythological in nature. Because of its structural potential for rhetorical effects, the elegiac couplet was used by both Greek and Roman poets for witty and satiric subject matter. Other than epitaphs, examples of ancient elegy as a poem of mourning include Catullus' Carmen 101, on his dead brother, elegies by Propertius on his dead mistress Cynthia and a matriarch of the prominent Cornelian family.
Ovid wrote elegies bemoaning his exile. In English literature, the more modern and restricted meaning, of a lament for a departed beloved or tragic event, has been current only since the sixteenth century; this looser concept is evident in the Old English Exeter Book which contains "serious meditative" and well-known poems such as "The Wanderer", "The Seafarer", "The Wife's Lament". In these elegies, the narrators use the lyrical "I" to describe their own personal and mournful experiences, they tell the story of the individual rather than the collective lore of his or her people as epic poetry seeks to tell. For Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others, the term had come to mean "serious meditative poem": Elegy is a form of poetry natural to the reflective mind, it may treat of any subject. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love became the principal themes of the elegy. Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone or absent and future. A famous example of elegy is Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
In French the most famous elegy is Le Lac by Alphonse de Lamartine."Elegy" may denote a type of musical work of a sad or somber nature. A well-known example is Op. 10, by Jules Massenet. This was written for piano, as a student work. Dirge Elegiac Funeral march Keening Kommós Lament Marsiya Noha Obituary poetry Pastoral elegy history Poetry Rithā' Soaz Threnody Ağıt Casey, Brian. "Genres and Styles," in Funeral Music Genres: With a Stylistic/Topical Lexicon and Transcriptions for a Variety of Instrumental Ensembles. University Press, Inc. Cavitch, Max. American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-4893-X. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-70340-1. Sacks, Peter M.. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-3471-6. Media related to Elegies at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of elegy at Wiktionary Elegy Explained at Literary Devices
Epic poetry
An epic poem, epos, or epopee is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily involving a time beyond living memory in which occurred the extraordinary doings of the extraordinary men and women who, in dealings with the gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the moral universe that their descendants, the poet and his audience, must understand to understand themselves as a people or nation. Another type of epic poetry is epyllion, a brief narrative poem with a romantic or mythological theme; the term, which means "little epic", came into use in the nineteenth century. It refers to the erudite, shorter hexameter poems of the Hellenistic period and the similar works composed at Rome from the age of the neoterics; the most famous example of classical epyllion is Catullus 64. The English word epic comes from the Latin epicus, which itself comes from the Ancient Greek adjective ἐπικός, from ἔπος, "word, poem". Originating before the invention of writing, primary epics were composed by bards who used complex rhetorical and metrical schemes by which they could memorize the epic as received in tradition and add to the epic in their performances.
Hence aside from writers like Dante, Camões, Milton, Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica and Virgil in Aeneid adopted and adapted Homer's style and subject matter, but used devices available only to those who write, in their works Nonnus' Dionysiaca and Tulsidas' Sri Ramacharit Manas used stylistic elements typical of epics. The oldest epic recognized is the Epic of Gilgamesh, recorded In ancient Sumer during the Neo-Sumerian Empire; the poem details the exploits of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk. Although recognized as a historical figure, Gilgamesh, as represented in the epic, is a legendary or mythical figure; the longest epic written is the ancient Indian Mahabharata, which consists of 100,000 ślokas or over 200,000 verse lines, as well as long prose passages, so that at about 1.8 million words it is about four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa, ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. Famous examples of epic poetry include the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Indian Mahabharata and Rāmāyaṇa, the Tamil Silappatikaram, the Persian Shahnameh, the Ancient Greek Odyssey and Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, the Old English Beowulf, Dante's Divine Comedy, the Finnish Kalevala, the German Nibelungenlied, the French Song of Roland, the Spanish Cantar de mio Cid, the Portuguese Os Lusíadas, John Milton's Paradise Lost, Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz.
The first epics were products of oral history poetic traditions. Oral tradition was used alongside written scriptures to communicate and facilitate the spread of culture. In these traditions, poetry is transmitted to the audience and from performer to performer by purely oral means. Early twentieth-century study of living oral epic traditions in the Balkans by Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated the paratactic model used for composing these poems. What they demonstrated was that oral epics tend to be constructed in short episodes, each of equal status and importance; this facilitates memorization, as the poet is recalling each episode in turn and using the completed episodes to recreate the entire epic as he performs it. Parry and Lord contend that the most source for written texts of the epics of Homer was dictation from an oral performance. Milman Parry and Albert Lord have argued that the Homeric epics, the earliest works of Western literature, were fundamentally an oral poetic form.
These works form the basis of the epic genre in Western literature. Nearly all of Western epic self-consciously presents itself as a continuation of the tradition begun by these poems. Classical epic poetry employs a meter called dactylic hexameter and recounts a journey, either physical or mental or both. Epics tend to highlight cultural norms and to define or call into question cultural values as they pertain to heroism. In his work Poetics, Aristotle defines an epic as one of the forms of poetry, contrasted with lyric poetry and with drama in the form of tragedy and comedy. In A Handbook to Literature and Holman define an epic: Epic: a long narrative poem in elevated style presenting characters of high position in adventures forming an organic whole through their relation to a central heroic figure and through their development of episodes important to the history of a nation or race. An attempt to delineate ten main characteristics of an epic: Begins in medias res; the setting is vast, covering the world or the universe.
Begins with an invocation to a muse. Begins with a statement of the theme. Includes the use of epithets. Contains long called an epic catalogue. Features long and formal speeches. Shows divine intervention on human affairs. Features heroes that embody the values of the civilization. Features the tragic hero's descent into the underworld or hell; the hero participates in a cyclical journey or quest, faces adversaries that try to defeat him in his journey and returns home transformed by his journey. The epic hero illustrates traits, performs deeds, exemplifies certain morals that are valued by the society the epic originates from. Many epic heroes are recurring characters in the legends of their native culture. Conventions of epics: Proposition: Opens by stating the cause of the epic; this may take the form
Pharaoh
Pharaoh is the common title of the monarchs of ancient Egypt from the First Dynasty until the annexation of Egypt by the Roman Empire in 30 BCE, although the actual term "Pharaoh" was not used contemporaneously for a ruler until Merneptah, c. 1200 BCE. In the early dynasty, ancient Egyptian kings used to have up to three titles, the Horus, the Sedge and Bee name, the Two Ladies name; the Golden Horus and nomen and prenomen titles were added. In Egyptian society, religion was central to everyday life. One of the roles of the pharaoh was as an intermediary between the people; the pharaoh thus deputised for the gods. He owned all of the land in Egypt, enacted laws, collected taxes, defended Egypt from invaders as the commander-in-chief of the army. Religiously, the pharaoh chose the sites of new temples, he was responsible for maintaining Maat, or cosmic order and justice, part of this included going to war when necessary to defend the country or attacking others when it was believed that this would contribute to Maat, such as to obtain resources.
During the early days prior to the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, the Deshret or the "Red Crown", was a representation of the Kingdom of Lower Egypt, while the Hedjet, the "White Crown", was worn by the kings of the kingdom of upper Egypt. After the unification of both kingdoms into one united Egypt, the Pschent, the combination of both the red and white crowns was the official crown of kings. With time new headdresses were introduced during different dynasties like the Khat, Atef, Hemhem crown, Khepresh. At times, it was depicted that a combination of these crowns would be worn together; the word pharaoh derives from the Egyptian compound pr ꜥꜣ, /ˌpaɾuwˈʕaʀ/ "great house", written with the two biliteral hieroglyphs pr "house" and ꜥꜣ "column", here meaning "great" or "high". It was used only in larger phrases such as smr pr-ꜥꜣ "Courtier of the High House", with specific reference to the buildings of the court or palace. From the Twelfth Dynasty onward, the word appears in a wish formula "Great House, May it Live, be in Health", but again only with reference to the royal palace and not the person.
Sometime during the era of the New Kingdom, Second Intermediate Period, pharaoh became the form of address for a person, king. The earliest confirmed instance where pr ꜥꜣ is used to address the ruler is in a letter to Akhenaten, addressed to "Great House, L, W, H, the Lord". However, there is a possibility that the title pr ꜥꜣ was applied to Thutmose III, depending on whether an inscription on the Temple of Armant can be confirmed to refer to that king. During the Eighteenth Dynasty the title pharaoh was employed as a reverential designation of the ruler. About the late Twenty-first Dynasty, instead of being used alone as before, it began to be added to the other titles before the ruler's name, from the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty it was, at least in ordinary usage, the only epithet prefixed to the royal appellative. From the nineteenth dynasty onward pr-ꜥꜣ on its own was used as as ḥm, "Majesty"; the term, evolved from a word referring to a building to a respectful designation for the ruler by the Twenty-Second Dynasty and Twenty-third Dynasty.
For instance, the first dated appearance of the title pharaoh being attached to a ruler's name occurs in Year 17 of Siamun on a fragment from the Karnak Priestly Annals. Here, an induction of an individual to the Amun priesthood is dated to the reign of Pharaoh Siamun; this new practice was continued under his successor Psusennes II and the Twenty-second Dynasty kings. For instance, the Large Dakhla stela is dated to Year 5 of king "Pharaoh Shoshenq, beloved of Amun", whom all Egyptologists concur was Shoshenq I—the founder of the Twenty-second Dynasty—including Alan Gardiner in his original 1933 publication of this stela. Shoshenq I was the second successor of Siamun. Meanwhile, the old custom of referring to the sovereign as pr-ˤ3 continued in traditional Egyptian narratives. By this time, the Late Egyptian word is reconstructed to have been pronounced * whence Herodotus derived the name of one of the Egyptian kings, Koine Greek: Φερων. In the Hebrew Bible, the title occurs as Hebrew: פרעה.
Pharaō, in Late Latin pharaō, both -n stem nouns. The Qur'an spells it Arabic: فرعون firʿawn with n; the Arabic combines the original ayin from Egyptian along with the -n ending from Greek. In English, it was at first spelled "Pharao", but the translators of the King James Bible revived "Pharaoh" with "h" from the Hebrew. Meanwhile, in Egypt itself, * evolved into Sahidic Coptic ⲡⲣ̅ⲣⲟ pərro and ərro by mistaking p- as the definite article "the". Other notable epithets are nswt, translated to "king". Sceptres and staves were a general sign of authority in ancient Egypt. One of the earliest royal scepters was discovered in the tomb of Khasekhemwy in Abydos. Kings were known to carry a staff, Pharaoh Anedjib is shown on stone vessels carrying a so-called mks-staff; the scepter with the longest history seems to be the heqa-sceptre, sometimes described as the shepherd's crook. The earli
Greek Anthology
The Greek Anthology is a collection of poems epigrams, that span the classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of the material of the Greek Anthology comes from two manuscripts, the Palatine Anthology of the 10th century and the Anthology of Planudes of the 14th century. While papyri containing fragments of collections of poetry have been found in Egypt, the earliest known anthology in Greek was compiled by Meleager of Gadara in the first century BC, under the title Anthologia, or "Flower-gathering." It contained poems by the compiler himself and forty-six other poets, including Archilochus, Alcaeus and Simonides. In his preface to his collection, Meleager describes his arrangement of poems as if it were a head-band or garland of flowers woven together in a tour de force that made the word "Anthology" a synonym for a collection of literary works for future generations. Meleager's Anthology was popular enough that it attracted additions. Prefaces to the editions of Philippus of Thessalonica and Agathias were preserved in the Greek Anthology to attest to their additions of poems.
The definitive edition was made by Constantine Cephalas in the 10th century, who added a number of other collections: homoerotic verse collected by Straton of Sardis in the 2nd century AD. The scholar Maximus Planudes made an edition of the Greek Anthology, which while adding some poems deleted or bowdlerized many of the poems he felt were too explicit, his anthology was the only one known to Western Europe until 1606 when Claudius Salmasius found in the library at Heidelberg a fuller collection based on Cephalas. The copy made by Salmasius was not, published until 1776, when Richard François Philippe Brunck included it in his Analecta; the first critical edition was that of F. Jacobs. Since its transmission to the rest of Europe, the Greek Anthology has left a deep impression on its readers. In a 1971 article on Robin Skelton's translation of a selection of poems from the Anthology, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement wrote, "The time of life does not exist when it is impossible to discover in it a masterly poem one had never seen before."
Its influence can be seen on writers as diverse as Ezra Pound and Edgar Lee Masters. Since full and uncensored English translations became available at the end of the 20th century, its influence has widened still further; the art of occasional poetry had been cultivated in Greece from an early period—less, however, as the vehicle of personal feeling than as the recognized commemoration of remarkable individuals or events, on sepulchral monuments and votive offerings: Such compositions were termed epigrams, i.e. inscriptions. The modern use of the word is a departure from the original sense, which indicated that the composition was intended to be engraved or inscribed; such a composition must be brief, the restraints attendant upon its publication concurred with the simplicity of Greek taste in prescribing conciseness of expression, pregnancy of meaning, purity of diction and singleness of thought, as the indispensable conditions of excellence in the epigrammatic style. The term was soon extended to any piece.
The transition from the monumental to the purely literary character of the epigram was favoured by the exhaustion of more lofty forms of poetry, the general increase, from the general diffusion of culture, of accomplished writers and tasteful readers, above all, by the changed political circumstances of the times, which induced many who would otherwise have engaged in public affairs to addict themselves to literary pursuits. These causes came into full operation during the Alexandrian era, in which we find every description of epigrammatic composition developed. 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 been formed by Polemon Periegetes and others, his selection, compiled from forty-six of his predecessors, including numerous contributions of his own, was entitled The Garland. The arrangement of his collection was alphabetical, according to the initial letter of each epigram.
In the age of the emperor Tiberius the work of Meleager was continued by another epigrammatist, Philippus of Thessalonica, who first employed the term anthology. His collection, which included the compositions of thirteen writers subsequent to Meleager, was arranged alphabetically, contained an introductory poem, it was of inferior quality to Meleager's. Somewhat under Hadrian, another supplement was formed by the sophist Diogenianus of Heracleia, Straton of Sardis compiled his elegant Μουσα Παιδικη from his productions and those of earlier writers. No further collection from various sources is recorded until the time of Justinian, when epigrammatic writing of an amatory character, experienced a great revival at the hands of Agathias of Myrina, the historian, Paulus Silentiarius, their circle. T
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Callimachus". Encyclopædia Britannica. 5 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 57.
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