Anthologia Latina

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The German philologist Alexander Riese called his collection of “small” Latin poems from ancient times, which was first edited in 1868 and which were handed down in handwritten form in various codices, as the Anthologia Latina . Pieter Burman the Younger had already published a comparable collection in Amsterdam in 1759–73 under the title Anthologia . The name is based on the Anthologia Palatina (also: Anthologia Graeca ), the incomparably more important collection of (old) Greek epigrams and small poetry, which is ancient in origin and in the form handed down to us was created in the Byzantine Middle Ages.

The basis of Riese's edition of small Latin poetry is the collection of the Codex Salmasianus from the 8th century, which was put together in North Africa towards the end of the Vandal rule (534). In addition to contemporary poets such as Luxurius , Minucius Felix and Florentinus , who worked at the court of the Vandal King Thrasamund in Carthage, there are also poems attributed to classical and post-classical Latin authors as well as numerous anonyma. This makes it the most important and most comprehensive collection of its kind for us, which was created in ancient times. In a second volume, Riese added further poems of ancient origin, which were found in other collections in more recent manuscripts of the 9th – 12th centuries. Century were handed down.

In 1895 , the German philologist Franz Bücheler added a two-volume collection of inscribed Latin poetry to the side, which was subtitled as the "second part" of the Anthologia Latina , but today mostly under the actual title Carmina Latina Epigraphica (abbreviated CLE) is quoted. With this, Bücheler took into account the fact that the boundaries between “real” verse inscriptions and those that were included in literary collections and only handed down there are by no means sharply drawn.

Due to numerous new finds, Bücheler's two-volume work was supplemented by a supplement (ed. Ernst Lommatzsch , 1926). Although Bücheler's collection is now out of date, even with this addition, it has not been replaced to this day and still forms the reference point for scholarly study of the Latin inscriptions. The same applies to Rieses' compilation of handwritten poems, for the first volume of which DR Shackleton Bailey presented a new text edition in 1982.

Anthologies (lat. Florilegien , German “flower reading”) in general are collections of excerpts from literature. The Greek poet Meleager of Gadara (approx. 140–70 BC) published a collection of epigrams by various authors under the title Stephanos (Greek "wreath", "garland") and thus interpreted the structure of a "network" of pieces of various origins. For us this is the earliest surviving example of an epigram anthology and at the same time the core of the above-mentioned Anthologia Graeca . The term “anthology” appears for the first time in the title of a two-volume, 152–162 work by the astronomer Vettius Valens from Antioch.

The beginning of the first Latin floriculture is in the dark. Right from the start, they served to preserve, distribute and treat texts in schools whose tradition was in jeopardy: forms of small art such as epigrams , aphorisms and apophthegmata . In addition to the Salmasian anthology, the most important collections of Latin poetry recognizable to us are the Corpus Priapeorum and the Epigrammata Bobiensia .

Editions, translations

  • Alexander Riese , Franz Bücheler , Ernst Lommatzsch (eds.): Anthologia Latina sive Poesis Latinae supplementum . Leipzig 1868–1926.
  • DR Shackleton Bailey (ed.): Anthologia Latina, Vol. I: Carmina in codicibus scripta, fasc. I: Libri Salmasiani aliorumque carmina . Stuttgart 1982.
  • Otto and Eva Schönberger (transl.): Anthologia Latina I. Flower harvest of Latin poetry. German translation . Wuerzburg 2013.
  • Wolfgang Fels ( transl. ): Anthologia Latina with the Virgil Centons. Introduced, translated and commented by WF Stuttgart 2014.

literature