100 Part One: Texts and Contexts
happiness can only be achieved by tranquillity and peace of mind. He has no
need of riches, fame or passions, but hopes to gain the magical plant, m0ly,
that wards off evil thoughts. If only he could live up to these convictions of his
till the day he dies! The poem is crammed with allusions to the Odyssey,
referring not only to the mysterious “moly”, but also to the lotus-eaters, the
gloomy cave of Circe and the enticing siren song. AP XV, 13 and 14 are two
fiercely combative poems by Constantine the Sicilian and Theophanes the
Grammarian. In the first poem Constantine brags about the professorial chair
he holds. He proudly informs us that it is a seat of knowledge on which only
highly educated people, like himself, are allowed to sit. His puffery is criticized
by Theophanes in the next poem. “This chair of yours is no big deal. It is not
of gold, not of silver, not of ivory. It is just a piece of wood. So, what are you
bragging about? Anyone, scholar or fool, can sit on a wooden chair”. In the
Anthologia Barberina, an early tenth-century collection of anacreontics and
alphabets (see below, pp. 123–128), we find the same three names, Leo the
Philosopher, Constantine the Sicilian and Theophanes the Grammarian, side
by side in a section devoted to the anacreontics of ninth-century grammarians
(nos. 58–64): Leo the Philosopher (58–59), Sergios and Leontios the Grammar-
ians (60–61), Constantine the Grammarian [=Const. the Sicilian] (62–63) and
Theophanes the Grammarian (64). Sergios and Leontios are mere names to us.
Seeing that the title of Leontios’ anacreontic (no longer extant in the manu-
script) clearly indicates that Leontios imitated an epigram of Agathias (AP V,
237)^49 , there can be little doubt that the Cycle of Agathias was already known
to the circle of Leo the Philosopher. In fact, it will become abundantly clear
that Leo the Philosopher and his students not only read, but also edited
ancient epigrams several decades before Cephalas compiled his anthology.
In a recent article I pointed out that one of the major sources Cephalas used
for his anthology was the Palladas Sylloge^50. This sylloge contained a lot of
Palladas, of course, but also a number of epigrams or epic fragments by Lucian,
Nestor of Laranda, Julian the Apostate, Cyrus of Panopolis, Claudian and
many others. The sylloge was put together in the sixth century, probably
between 551 and 567, in response to the fashionable revival of the epigram that
was to lead to Agathias’ compilation of the Cycle. However, Cephalas did not
have direct access to an original sixth-century manuscript, but made use of a
ninth-century copy made by or for Leo the Philosopher^51. Leo the Philoso-
pher’s manuscript of the Palladas Sylloge also included a number of epigrams
he had written himself: AP IX, 200–203, 214 and 578. These epigrams were
(^49) See LAUXTERMANN 1999a: 166–167 and CRIMI 2001: 39–40.
(^50) See LAUXTERMANN 1997.
(^51) See WIFSTRAND 1933: 169–170 and LAUXTERMANN 1999a: 161–163.