excellence, and beside him Aratus the knower of the stars, cutting the first-born spires of that heaven-high palm, and the fair-tressed lotus of Chaeremon mixed with the gilliflower of Phaedimus, and the round ox-eye of Antagoras, and the wine-loving fresh-blown wild thyme of Theodorides, and the bean-blossoms of Phanias, and many newly- scriptured shoots of others; and with them also even from his own Muse some early white violets. But to my friends I give thanks; and the sweet-languaged garland of the Muses is common to all initiate." In this list three poets are not spoken of directly by name, but, from metrical or other reasons, are alluded to paraphrastically. "He who had his surname from the Dioscori" is Dioscorides; "the poet who sang of himself as Hermes' gifts" is Hermodorus; and "the son of Sicelides" is Asclepiades, referred to under the same name by his great pupil Theocritus. The names of these forty-eight poets (including Meleager himself) show that the collection embraced epigrams of all periods from the earliest times up to his own day. Six belong to the early period of the lyric poets, ending with the Persian wars; Archilochus, who flourished about 700 B.C., Sappho and Erinna a century afterwards, Simonides and Anacreon about 500 B.C., and a little later, Bacchylides. Five more belong to the fourth century B.C., the period which begins with the destruction of the Athenian empire and ends with the establishment of the Macedonian kingdoms of the Diadochi. Of these, Plato is still within the Athenian period; Hegesippus, Simmias, Anyte, and Phaedimus, all towards the end of the century, mark the beginning of the Alexandrian period. Four have completely disappeared out of the Anthology as we possess it; Melanippides, a celebrated writer of dithyrambic poetry in the latter half of the fifth century B.C., of which a few fragments survive, and Euphemus, Parthenis, and Polycleitus, of whom nothing whatever is known. The remaining thirty- three poets in Meleager's list all belong to the Alexandrian period, and bring the series down continuously to Meleager himself. One of the epigrams in the Anthology of Strato[8] professes to be the colophon {xoronis} to Meleager's collection; but it is a stupid and clumsy forgery of an obviously later date, probably by Strato himself, or some contemporary, and is not worth quoting. The proem to the Garland is a work of great ingenuity, and contains in single words and phrases many exquisite criticisms. The phrase used of Sappho has become proverbial; hardly less true and pointed are those on Erinna, Callimachus, and Plato. All the flowers are carefully and appropriately chosen with reference to their poets, and the whole is done with the light and sure touch of a critic who is also a poet himself.