Taking on faith the conventional story that Meleager arranged his Garland alphabetically (he did not), and therefore finding no trace of its original structure in the Palatine Anthology (where in fact its traces are plain), Wright must decide on an appropriate arrangement for his English versions.
In this too he follows an interpretative tradition, though a minor one nurtured by amateurs. It goes back to a very early translator into English, Robert Bland (1806), whom I quote here:
The first of Meleager’s collections was necessarily exposed to [mediaeval monks’] fury. The specimens of that work which yet remain too abundantly justify the persecution. It was written for the express purpose of celebrating Eastern sensuality...
But unfortunately its indiscriminating enemies appear to have been actuated by a rage no less furious, against those beautiful relics of affection and sorrow, by which the poet endeavoured to make amends to an insulted world for the extravagance of his youth.
Bland and his collaborator John Herman Merivale proposed a version of the Anthology's prehistory whereby Meleager was the author of (at least) two epigram-books before he embarked on the Garland:
- An early book of pederastic verses;
- A subsequent book of heterosexual love-poems.
The claim that few of Meleager's erotic poems have survived the censors' wrath reads oddly today, in the light of the sixty-odd poem attributed to Meleager in Book 12 ('Strato's Boyish Muse'); but clearly Bland was working from one of the various print editions that derived from Maximus Planudes' castrated thirteenth-century redaction. The older and fuller version of Cephalas' Anthology preserved in the Palatine MS was known of, among those in the know, but its first useable modern edition was not yet complete -- and indeed publishers were to carry on reprinting their old Planudes-based properties well into the nineteenth century, because it was well known and they had the plates in hand.
If his introductory remarks are any guide, Wright had not investigated any of the modern scholarship on the Anthology. He had looked into Symonds's Studies of the Greek Poets (1873), though he had skipped or forgotten the bit about manuscripts and versions; and he had happened upon an ancient copy of Bland. That was the limit of his learning. Accordingly his Meleager is a poet of three phases:
- Poems of youth;
- Poems of manhood;
- Poems of age.
I'll look at how he handles this three-act structure in another blog post.
