The Poetics of Editing in Meleager's Garland

Abstract

About 100 B.C.E. Meleager of Gadara created an anthology of Greek epigrams, including over one hundred thirty of his own poems, mostly erotic in nature. This ZTEfa-voS or Garland, as it was called, eventually replaced the earlier poetry books from which it had been gathered and became the principal source for the transmission of Hellenistic literary epigrams.' Although Meleager's collection as a whole failed to survive the Byzantine era, much of its contents was excerpted by Constantine Cephalas in the early tenth century and placed in a compendium that formed the basis for our Palatine Anthology. Scholarly study of this Byzantine anthology has now dramatically improved our understanding of the structure and aesthetic arrangement of Meleager's Garland. The purpose of this paper is to show that the progress thus made on the anthology permits a new understanding of how Meleager's epigrammatic poetry functioned within its original context. The older view of Meleager as bombastic, sentimental, and unoriginal has been replaced in recent years with an appreciation of his ability to rework the earlier epigrammatic tradition into poems of striking originality.2 While Meleager's skill at the art of variation clearly bears a connection to his talents as the editor of an aesthetically arranged anthology, scholars have been content to study his epigrams as isolated poems or in relation to one or two epigrams he varies.3 In this paper I analyze a number of his poems from the perspective of their Garland sequence in order to show that their meaning as erotic verse, emanating from Meleager's poetic persona, is enhanced by a secondary layer of meaning, emanating from his editorial persona. When so read, Meleager's poetry takes on a dual reference to both erotic experience and the poetics of the collection.