SELECT EPIGRAMS FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION - III: The Sources
THE MATERIAL out of which this selection has been made is principally that immense mass of epigrams known as the Greek Anthology. An account of this celebrated collection and the way in which it was formed will be given presently; here it will be sufficient to say that, in addition to about four hundred Christian epigrams of the Byzantine period, it contains some three thousand seven hundred epigrams of all dates from 700 B.C. to 1000 or even 1200 A.D., preserved in two Byzantine collections, the one probably of the tenth, the other of the fourteenth century, named respectively the Palatine and Planudean Anthologies. The great mass of the contents of both is the same; but the former contains a large amount of material not found in the latter, and the latter a small amount not found in the former.
For much the greatest number of these epigrams the Anthology is the only source. But many are also found cited by various authors or contained among their other works. It is not necessary to pursue this subject into detail. A few typical instances are the citations of the epitaph by Simonides on the three hundred Spartans who fell at Thermopylae, not only by Herodotus[1] but by Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, the former in a historical, the latter in a geographical, work: of the epigram by Plato on the Eretrian exiles[2] by Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius: of many epigrams purporting to be written by philosophers, or actually written upon them and their works, by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Philosophers. Plutarch among the vast mass of his historical and ethical writings quotes incidentally a considerable number of epigrams. A very large number are quoted by Athenaeus in that treasury of odds and ends, the Deipnosophistae. A great many too are cited in the lexicon which goes under the name of Suidas, and which, beginning at an unknown date, continued to receive additional entries certainly up to the eleventh century.
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