Anthol´ogy

(Gr. anthos , a flower, and legein , to gather), the name given to several collections of short poems which have come down from antiquity. The first to compile a Greek anthology was Meleager, a Syrian, about 60 B.C. He entitled his collection, which contained selections from forty-six poets besides many pieces of his own, the Garland ; a continuation of this work by Philip of The alonica in the age of Tiberius was the first entitled Anthology . Later collections are that of Const an tine Cephalas, in the tenth century, who made much use of the earlier ones, and that of Maximus Planudes, in the fourteenth century, a monk of Constantinople, whose anthology is a tastele series of extracts from the Anthology of Cephalas, with some additions. The treasures contained in both, increased with fragments of the older poets, idylls of the bucolic poets, the hymns of Call i mach us, epigrams from monuments and other works, have been published in modern times as the Greek Anthology . There is no ancient Latin anthology, the oldest being that of Scaliger (1573).