Butler Joshua A. Amaranth and Asphodel Poems from the Greek Antology

Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1922. — 278 p.Greek-English bilingual edition. High quality scan.The Anthology, from which the poems in this volume are borrowed, may fairly claim the double interest of possessing at once paramount artistic and antiquarian value. There is no book like it for the student who wishes to understand the motives and conditions of Greek life, yet it is little known or read even among scholars. In publishing these verses, I venture to hope that more of those who can read Greek will turn to the perusal of the original and that some of those who cannot may find pleasure in the copies.The first collections — the Stephanos of Meleager BC 60, and the Anthologia of Philippus 150 years later — are lost. Cephalas in the tenth century and Planudes, a monk of Byzantium, in the fourteenth, from whose works the existing Anthology is compiled, professed to arrange by subject. The principle seems right, in default of any certain chronological order: but their arrangement is so loose and so careless of cross-division, that I have not scrupled to depart from it and lay down the main lines afresh; though in any order whatever some cross-division must remain, nor can any grouping of the poems fail to seem arbitrary or faulty in some particulars. The fact is, many of them are so essentially independent that it would be a blunder of taste to force them into any special order. Thus the poems on Nature are strung together without system: between the pretty ode of Meleager and the magnificent lines of Ptolemy at the end come random little songs about bees, cicalas, and birds. All, however, show how tender and childlike, yet how real and deep, was the Greek love of nature — a fact I cannot imagine anyone doubting who has understood six epithets in Homer or seen a coin of Rhodos or Metapontum.The first edition of this little book achieved at least a rarity beyond its merits: for the greater part of it — before it could reach the booksellers — was destroyed in a warehouse fire. Full forty years have passed since that time, years for the writer full of work which suffered few and short periods of release. Moreover such leisure as College duties afforded was devoted partly to travel, partly to study and research in other fields, in which the interest was oriental rather other than classical.