The Scholiast, in this same passage, speaks of Meleager's collection
as an {epigrammaton stephanos}, and obviously it consisted in the main
of epigrams according to the ordinary definition. But it is curious
that Meleager himself nowhere uses the word; and from some phrases in
the proem it is difficult to avoid the inference that he included
other kinds of minor poetry as well. Too much stress need not be laid
on the words {umnos} and {aoide}, which in one form or another are
repeatedly used by him; though it is difficult to suppose that "the
hymns of Melanippides", who is known to have been a dithyrambic poet,
can mean not hymns but epigrams.[9] But where Anacreon is mentioned,
his {melisma} and his elegiac pieces are unmistakably distinguished
from each other, and are said to be both included; and this {melisma}
must mean lyric poetry of some kind, probably the very hemiambics
under the name of Anacreon which are extant as an appendix to the
Palatine MS. Meleager's Anthology also pretty certainly included his
own Song of Spring,[10] which is a hexameter poem, though but for the
form of verse it might just come within a loose definition of an
epigram. Whether it included idyllic poems like the Amor Fugitivus of
Moschus[11] it is not possible to determine.

Besides his great Anthology, another, of the same class of contents as
that subsequently made by Strato, is often ascribed to Meleager, an
epigram in Strato's Anthology[12] being regarded as the proem to this
supposed collection. But there is no external authority whatever for
this hypothesis; nor is it necessary to regard this epigram as
anything more than a poem commemorating the boys mentioned in it.
Eros, not Meleager, is in this case the weaver of the garland.

The next compiler of an Anthology, more than a century after Meleager,