n ruder scales and with a poise less
perfect. He had the wide round of the best of Greek to pick from, and he
chose with unerring taste. To his collection Philippus of Thessalonica,
working when Paul was preaching in Jason's house, added the work of the
Roman period, the fourth development of the epigram. Other collections
between have perished, one in the third or Byzantine period, in which
this verse had a renaissance under Justinian. In the tenth century a
Byzantine scholar, Constantinos Cephalas, rearranged his predecessors'
collections,--Meleager's included,--and brought together the largest
number which has come down to us. The collection is known to-day as the
'Palatine Anthology,' from the library which long owned it. His work was
in the last flare of life in the Lower Empire, when Greek heroism, for
the last time, stemmed the Moslem tide and gave Eastern Europe
breathing-space. When his successor Maximus Planudes, of the century of
Petrarch,--monk, diplomat, theologian, and phrase-maker,--addressed
himself to the last collection made, the shadow of new Italy lay over
Greek life, and the Galilean had recast the minds of men. He excluded
much that Greeks, from Meleager to Cephalas, had freely admitted, and
which modern lovers of the Anthology would be willing to see left out of
all copies but their own. The collection of Planudes long remained alone
known (first edition Florence, 1594). That of Cephalas survived in a
single manuscript of varied fortune, seen in 1606 by Salmasius at
eighteen,--happy boy, and happy manuscript!--lost to learning for a
century and a half in the Vatican, published by Brunck, 1776, and
finally edited by Frederic Jacobs, 1794-1803, five volumes of text and
three of comment, usually bound in eight. The text has been republished
by Tauchnitz, and the whole work has its most convenient and familiar
form for scholars in the edition of both the collections of Planudes and
Cephalas, with epigrams from all other sources prepared by Frederic
Duebner for Didot's 'Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum,' 1864-1872, three
volumes. The Anthology as a whole has no adequate English translation.
About one-third of the poems have a prose translation by George Burges
in the 'Greek Anthology,' 1832, of Bohn's series, with versions in verse
by many hands.

The first English translation of selections appeared anonymously, 1791.
Others have succeeded: Robert Bland and John Herman Merivale, 1806;
Robert Bland, 181