SOURCE: Gutzwiller, Kathryn J. “Meleager.” In Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context, pp. 276-301. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Gutzwiller considers Meleager as a poet and as an anthologist, and discusses the principles he used to determine the sequence of poems in his Garland.

Our biographical information about Meleager comes primarily from his four self-epitaphs.¹ He was a native of Gadara in Palestine, spent his youth in Tyre, and settled in later life on the island of Cos, where he composed his Garland.² From the fringes of Syro-Phoenician culture, he thus moved progressively closer to the center of the Hellenic world. In addition to about one hundred thirty known epigrams, predominantly erotic, he wrote Menippean satire, now lost, under the influence of the Cynic Menippus, also a native of Gadara.³ According to the lemmatist's notes on the introduction to the Garland, Meleager flourished in...