Birds and Beasts, by a Beast

 One of my favourite books about the Greek Anthology is Norman Douglas' Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology (1928), which does what it says on the tin in a not terribly systematic way. I like it not least for the self-deprecating charm of the author's introduction, from which I quoted in my last big book, Greek Epigram in Reception:

Three years, I finally concluded, might suffice for the venture. Three years, under some vine-wreathed arbour, with the necessary books at one's elbow, and one's soul at ease... Such a thing, it is obvious, should be a holiday performance; written con amore and not otherwise; in reverential, playfully-erudite fashion. Three years or even more; for I soon realized that the enterprise might well blossom -- why not? -- into a general treatise on ancient Natural History... Three years, I kept on saying to myself -- where shall they be found?

I shall not find them.

Remembered as a novelist and travel writer, Douglas was an aficionado of vine-wreathed arbours; he spent a great deal of time in Posillipo, Capri, Florence, and the French Riviera, moving on whenever scandal blossomed and the law threatened to catch up. Unfortunately it turns out he was a dreadful sex criminal in modern terms. He never got those three straight years because he kept being run out of town.You should never Google your heroes.

But to continue, just the once. This is Douglas on what he managed to come up with, his chaotic lifestyle  notwithstanding. His 'my Anthology' was surely Paton's Loeb:

The pencillings then scrawled in my Anthology are fast fading; I amplified them later with references to such authorities as were accessible, but a good many others would have to be consulted... which I have not been able to procure.

An undertaking, for the rest, of the gentlemanly kind; quite useless. No doubt an interesting little paper might be written, were we to investigate nothing but the Natural History of a single period or of a single poet, such as Meleager... or if we devoted ourselves to one particular beast, say, the lion or the bee... A monograph of this kind would be brief indeed but not without a certain value from a scientific point of view. 

To compile, on the other hand, a long list of creatures mentioned only at hazard (some of the most conspicuous animals are not so much as named in this collection); a list of creatures mentioned by poets good and bad, poets of divers nationalities, poets scattered over a large geographical area and over a period of fifteen hundred years of time -- to compile such a list: what more exquisitely unprofitable?

 'What more exquisitely unprofitable?': it's as if he had foreseen REF.