The Greek Anthology

Lush Diodorus sets the lads on fire, But now another has him in his net - Timarion, the boy with wanton eyes . . . Meleager, AP 12.109 Encompassing four thousand short poems and more, the ramshackle classic we call the Greek Anthology gathers up a millennium of snapshots from ancient daily life. Its influence echoes not merely in the classic tradition of the English epigram (Pope, Dryden) but in Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Virgina Woolf, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and the poets of the First World War. Its variety is almost infinite. Victorious armies, ruined cities, and Olympic champions share space with lovers' quarrels and laments for the untimely dead - but also with jokes and riddles, art appreciation, potted biographies of authors, and scenes from country life and the workplace. This selection of more than 600 epigrams in verse is the first major translation from the Greek Anthology in nearly a century. Each of the Anthology's books of epigrams is represented here, in manuscript order, and with extensive notes on the history and myth that lie behind them.

The Greek Anthology is one of the great books of European literature, "a garden containing the flowers and weeds of 1500 years of Greek epigram." Cameron's study adds a wealth of new information about its growth over an even longer period, from the earliest papyrus anthologies down to the 1606 rediscovery of the Palatine Anthology (AP), our principal source for the entire history of Greek epigram, from Simonides to the Byzantine age. It was a Byzantine schoolmaster, Constantine Cephalas, who excerpted all the major ancient collections around 900. His work is reconstructed from a closer analysis of AP (ca 940) and the various later collections. Following a number of neglected clues, Cameron identifies the compiler of AP as Constantine the Rhodian, and solves the mystery of the wanderings of AP during the renaissance, showing that it once belonged to Sir Thomas More.

Book XII of The Greek Anthology, compiled at the court of Hadrian by the poet Strato, contains 258 polished epigrams on the subject of Boy Love'. The short poems, written by such poets as Callimachus, Meleager and Strato himself, are presented in Greek with facing English translation.