The Greek Anthology Quietly Preserved a Whole Genre of Wine Poems

By Ken Wytsma · Researched, fact-checked & verified.

Somewhere around 900 CE, a Byzantine schoolteacher sat down to copy out a mountain of old Greek poems so his students would have something worth reading. He could not have known he was performing a rescue. Among the thousands of little poems he saved was an entire genre almost no one talks about: the ancient Greek wine poem, the sympotic epigram — four or six lines on a cup, a hangover, a short life, a longing to drink now. They survive today for one reason. People kept copying them.

What the Greek Anthology actually is

The Greek Anthology is not a book anyone sat down to write. It is a collection of collections — about 3,700 short poems by Britannica’s count, and closer to four or five thousand if you fold in the later Christian and descriptive material. Encyclopædia Britannica calls it a body of “epigrams, songs, epitaphs, and rhetorical exercises, mostly in elegiac couplets,” and notes that it “illustrates the continuity of Greek literature for almost 2,000 years.”

An epigram, here, is not a witticism. It is a very short poem — originally the kind of thing you might carve on a tomb or a votive offering, later a miniature art form in its own right. Love, death, a statue, a cup of wine: say it in four lines, and stop.

Within that huge miscellany sits a recognizable strand of poems about drinking — the symposium, the mixing bowl, the cup passed around, the short day that is “but a finger’s breadth.” It is, in effect, a whole small genre of wine writing, older than any wine critic, and the Anthology is far and away our richest source for it.

The poems themselves

The wine epigrams are gathered mostly in what we now call Book 11, the convivial and satirical poems, and they run from the tender to the sardonic. Some urge you to drink because the day is short. Some warn that the right amount of wine is a narrow target.

One of the most famous, attributed to Asclepiades, is pure carpe diem: “Drink, Asclepiades. Why these tears?… Let us quaff the unmixed drink of Bacchus. The day is but a finger’s breadth.” Another, attributed to Euenus, is almost a maxim on moderation: “The best measure of wine is neither much nor very little; for it is the cause of either grief or madness.” (Both come to us in W. R. Paton’s Loeb translation, and both, like most poems here, carry their author’s name only by tradition — attributions in the Anthology are famously slippery.)

Read a dozen of them and the effect is uncanny. People two thousand years dead are talking about exactly what we talk about over a bottle: that life is brief, that company is the point, that the second glass is wisdom and the fourth is trouble.

A rescue in three hands

Here is the part that gives the story its quiet drama. None of the original collections that fed the Anthology survive on their own. They exist only because each was copied into the next.

The nucleus was assembled around 100 BCE by Meleager of Gadara, who called his collection the Stephanos — the Garland — and imagined each poet as a flower woven in. In the first century CE, Philip of Thessalonica made another garland; in the sixth, Agathias gathered a Cycle. Then, around 900 CE, the Byzantine scholar Constantine Cephalas folded these lost anthologies into one master compilation. Four centuries later, in 1301, the monk Maximus Planudes made his own edition — the source of a handful of poems found nowhere else.

Every link in that chain is a person choosing to recopy poems that were already old. Lose any one of them and much of this poetry simply vanishes. The genre survived not because it was carved in stone but because it was carried, by hand, across a thousand years.

The manuscript that crossed the Alps

The single most important witness is a manuscript now called the Codex Palatinus, copied in Constantinople around 940 CE. It preserves the fifteen books of the Anthology as Cephalas shaped them. (A sixteenth book, the poems unique to Planudes, comes from that separate later manuscript — so the two traditions together give us the whole.)

Then it disappears from view for centuries, resurfacing in the great library of the Counts Palatine at Heidelberg. Around 1606 — some say 1607 — the French scholar Claude Salmasius recognized what he was holding: the only complete copy of Cephalas’s unexpurgated collection. His transcription is why the full text re-entered the world.

The manuscript’s own adventures were not over. When Heidelberg fell during the Thirty Years’ War, the library was packed into crates and hauled over the Alps to the Vatican. Today the Codex Palatinus is split between Heidelberg and Paris, two halves of the book that saved the ancient wine poem. It is worth remembering, next time a poem feels disposable, how narrowly this one genre escaped.

The genre survived not because it was carved in stone but because it was carried, by hand, across a thousand years.

This day in wine history

• c. 100 BCE — Meleager of Gadara compiles the Garland, the nucleus of the Anthology.
• c. 900 CE — Constantine Cephalas assembles the master collection behind the Palatine manuscript.
• 1301 — Maximus Planudes compiles his edition, preserving poems found nowhere else.
• c. 1606 — Claude Salmasius rediscovers the Codex Palatinus at Heidelberg.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

Wander further into wine’s literary past with our look at Wine Poems in History, or browse the ideas-and-letters side of the vine in our Turning Points in Wine History collection.

Further reading

As an Amazon Associate, This Day in Wine History earns from qualifying purchases. Book links are affiliate links; cover images are used for identification.

The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Greek Epigrams
ed. Peter Jay
Ancient Greek epigrams, including many convivial verses on wine and drinking.

Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture
Patrick E. McGovern
Archaeological search for wine’s origins, illuminating Greek symposium culture.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica, “Greek Anthology” — encyclopedic reference. britannica.com
2. The Greek Anthology, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. IV (Books 10–12) — primary text and translation. harvard.edu
3. Alan Cameron, The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes (Oxford, 1993) — the standard study of transmission. oup.com
4. Cambridge University Library, Polonsky Greek Manuscripts project, “From Constantinople to Heidelberg” — research-library scholarship on the manuscript. lib.cam.ac.uk
5. W. R. Paton’s Loeb translations of Book 11 and of Asclepiades (reproduced at attalus.org) — primary text access. attalus.org
6. D. van Miert et al., “The discovery of the Palatine Anthology (1606),” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 74 (2011) — peer-reviewed account of the rediscovery. warburg.sas.ac.uk

Love the stories where wine and history collide?
Explore This Day in Wine History — a new story every few days.