Three Mid-Century ‘Anthologies’

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how little understood the Greek Anthology remained as the nineteenth century advanced. Three mid-century handbooks demonstrate how partial and disorganized an account of Greek literature readers were receiving; within it, epigram occupied at best a marginal role. The three mid-century 'Greek Anthologies' with which the chapter is centrally concerned - Henry Wellesley's Anthologia Polyglotta (1849), George Burges's Greek Anthology for the Bohn Classical Library (1852), and Robert MacGregor's laborious Greek Anthology of 1864 — were all blind alleys in their separate ways.Wellesley and Burges are best understood against a centuries-old context: the institutionalized use of Greek epigram for rote linguistic drills in elite education. All three translators presuppose a reader from their own privileged educational background, and a shared habit of rhetorically opposing the style and values of Greek epigram to the Latin epigrams of Martial