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.

These same sources supply us with a considerable gleaning of epigrams
which either were omitted by the collectors of the Anthology or have
disappeared from our copies. The present selection for example