114 Part One: Texts and Contexts
generous forget entirely their beneficence”. This is Homer all over again: the
souls of the dead remembering their former life on earth. But then Christianity
brutely intrudes into the Homeric scene: Febronia is compared to the biblical
virgins who kept their oil lamp burning while waiting for the divine bride-
groom. Febronia kept her oil and wicking alight by her charity to the poor.
That is why she reposes in her tomb deeply asleep, but certain of entering the
bridal chamber of Christ. Arethas has no feel for the elegiac: verses without
caesura (32. 1, 3, 11; 34. 1 and 9), ugly sounding spondaics (e.g. 32. 5; 34. 5),
neglect of bridges (32. 13; 34. 3, 5 and 9), etc.
The classicistic sylloge of AP XV, 28–40 closes with an anonymous book
epigram on a certain scholar who prepared an annotated edition of Plato or
perhaps a commentary on the Platonic corpus (AP XV, 39, vv. 4–5). The poem
probably dates from the late ninth century in the light of the fashionable
revival of Plato at the time^100. It is highly unfortunate that the B manuscript
does not record the name of the author of the epigram, because the odds are
that he was the same person who compiled the classicistic sylloge and who
owned the exemplar copied by the B scribes. For, as we shall see below, owners
of a manuscript of Cephalas’ anthology usually add epigrams of their own, thus
allowing us to reconstruct the text history of the Greek Anthology.
**
*
Constantine the Rhodian and Others
The anthology of Cephalas must have been a tremendous success right from
the start given the great number of tenth-century manuscript copies; these are
now all lost except for the Palatine manuscript, but there is ample evidence of
them. The Sylloge Euphemiana contained various excerpts from the anthology
of Cephalas rearranged in a new order. The original sylloge is lost, but we
possess two independent sources that derive from it: a late fifteenth-century
version of the sylloge (regrettably with substantial omissions) and the epi-
grams copied by the twelfth-century scribe Sp in the Palatine manuscript^101.
The Sylloge Euphemiana is named after the person to whom it is dedicated,
Euphemios. Its author is unknown, but in the two dedicatory epigrams that
accompany the sylloge, he informs us that he was born in Hypata in Thessaly
(^100) See J. IRIGOIN, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 5 (1962) 287–292, LEMERLE 1971: 167–
169, and ALPERS 1991: 260–267.
(^101) See CAMERON 1993: 254–277.