84 Part One: Texts and Contexts
as well as AP XV, 28–40 (pp. 705–706 and 693–695). Since the outside leaves
of the last quaternion, no. 44 (pp. 691–706), were accidentally folded wrong
during binding, the original order of the epigrams is as follows: AP XV, 40 and
28–39.
The rest of the manuscript (pp. 1–452, 643–692 and 696–704) was written
by J, A^1 and A^2. It contains the first four books of Cephalas’ anthology: AP V,
VI, VII and IX, 1–562, plus the introduction to it, AP IV^4. It also contains
APVIII (Gregory of Nazianzos’ epitaphs), a book that does not belong to the
original Cephalas, but was added to it in the early tenth century^5. Before and
after the anthology of Cephalas we find various long poems and collections of
epigrams. The poems at the beginning of the Palatine manuscript are the
following: Nonnos’ Paraphrase of the Gospel according to John (no longer extant
due to the loss of seven quires), Paul the Silentiary’s Ekphrasis of the Hagia
Sophia and of its Ambo, various dogmatic poems by Gregory of Nazianzos, a
collection of Christian epigrams (AP I), Christodoros of Thebes’ Ekphrasis of
the Statues in the Zeuxippos (AP II), and a collection of inscriptions found in a
temple at Kyzikos (AP III). At the end of the manuscript, after pp. 453–642
written by scribes B, we again find a hotchpotch of various poems: John of
Gaza’s Ekphrasis of the World Map in the Winter Baths of Gaza, a collection of
epigrams (AP XV, 1–20 and 23), the Hellenistic Technopaegnia (AP XV, 21–22
and 24–27), and the Anacreontea. Then we have the last quaternion (no. 44),
the first pages of which were copied by scribe B^3 ; on the remaining pages scribe
J copied various poems by Gregory of Nazianzos.
There can be little doubt that scribe J is the final redactor of the manu-
script. Scribe J supplements lacunas, adds lemmata and ascriptions, and at-
tempts to unite the various parts of the manuscript so that the seams do not
show. In his magnificent book on the Greek Anthology, Alan Cameron con-
vincingly proved that scribe J is none other than the famous tenth-century
poet, Constantine the Rhodian, and demonstrated that the Palatine Anthology
was compiled not long after 944^6. The so-called Corrector examined the manu-
script after it had already been executed, and made a great number of excellent
corrections, for which he used an apograph of Cephalas’ anthology made by
(^4) Incidentally, this also explains the scholion attached to AP IV, 1, stating that the
anthology of Cephalas was divided into four categories ™n t/ parönti ptykt5ù: namely,
erotic, anathematic, sepulchral and epideictic (=AP V, VI, VII and IXa). By this, scribe
J simply means to say that the present volume, copied by himself and scribes A, contains
only these four categories. The scholion does not apply to the rest of Cephalas’ anthol-
ogy, which was copied by scribes B.
(^5) See CAMERON 1993: 145–146.
(^6) CAMERON 1993: 108–116 and 300–307. See also P. ORSINI, BollGrott 54 (2000) 425–435,
who, for no good reason, questions the validity of Cameron’s arguments.