Mediaeval Rhodian Love-Poems

Abstract

The study of mediaeval Greek literature has lately experienced a serious loss in the early death of Dr. W. Wagner, who by his Medieval Greek Texts, published for the English Philological Society, his Carmina Graeca Medii Aevi, and other works on the same subject, has deserved well of all who are interested in the writings of that period. Not the least important addition to our knowledge of this branch of literature is that which he made shortly before his death by publishing The Alphabet of Love (Ὁ ἀλφάβητος τῆς ἀγάπης, Leipzig: Teubner). The manuscript from which this is printed for the first time was discovered by him in the British Museum during the spring of 1878, and it contains a collection of love-poems in the usual Greek ballad-metre, which were partly arranged according to their initial letter; this system Dr. Wagner has introduced throughout, whence the name The Alphabet of Love. The place of their composition is shown by internal evidence to have been Rhodes, for in one of the poems the writer represents her lover, who has gone into foreign lands, as saying that he had left her in that island—