Epigrams, Greek; Greek poetry -- Translations into English
Book IV.--Epigrams on monuments, statues, animals, and places, in
thirty-three chapters; some from the {Epideiktika} of Cephalas, but
for the greater part new.
Book V.--Christodorus' description of the statues in the gymnasium
called Zeuxippus, and a collection of epigrams in the Hippodrome at
Constantinople; from appendices to the Anthology of Cephalas.
Book VI.--{Anathematika}, in twenty-seven chapters; from the
{Anathematika} of Cephalas, with four new epigrams.
Book VII.--{Erotika}; from the {Erotika} of Cephalas, with twenty-six
new epigrams.
Obviously then the Anthology of Planudes was almost wholly taken from
that of Cephalas, with the exception of epigrams on works of art,
which are conspicuously absent from the earlier collection as we
possess it. As to these there is only one conclusion. It is impossible
to account for Cephalas having deliberately omitted this class of
epigrams; it is impossible to account for their re-appearance in
Planudes, except on the supposition that we have lost a section of the
earlier Anthology which included them. The Planudean Anthology
contains in all three hundred and ninety-seven epigrams, which are not
in the Palatine MS. of Cephalas. It is in these that its principal
value lies. The vitiated taste of the period selected later and worse
in preference to earlier and better epigrams; the compilation was made
carelessly and, it would seem, hurriedly, the earlier part of the
sections of Cephalas being largely transcribed and the latter part
much less fully, as though the editor had been pressed for time or
lost interest in the work as he went on. Not only so, but he mutilated
the text freely, and made sweeping conjectural restorations where it
was imperfect. The discrepancies too in the authorship assigned to
epigrams are so frequent and so striking that they can only be
explained by great carelessness in transcription; especially as
internal evidence where it can be applied almost uniformly supports
the headings of the Palatine Anthology.
Such as it was, however, the Anthology of Planudes displaced that of
Cephalas almost at once, and remained the only MS. source of the
anthology until the seventeenth century. The other entirely
disappeared, unless a copy of it was the manuscript belonging to
Angelo Colloti, seen and mentioned by the Roman scholar and
antiquarian Fulvio Orsini (b. 1529, d. 1600) about the middle of the
sixteenth century, and then again lost to view. The Planudean
Anthology was first printed at Florence in 1484 by the Greek scholar,
Janus Lascaris, from a good MS. It continued to be reprinted from time
to time, the last edition being the five sumptuous quarto volumes
issued from the press of Wild and Altheer at Utrecht, 1795-1822.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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