Straton of Sardis
Encyclopedia
Straton of Sardis was a Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 poet and anthologist from the Lydia
Lydia
Lydia was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor located generally east of ancient Ionia in the modern Turkish provinces of Manisa and inland İzmir. Its population spoke an Anatolian language known as Lydian....

n city of Sardis
Sardis
Sardis or Sardes was an ancient city at the location of modern Sart in Turkey's Manisa Province...

. He is thought to have lived during the time of Hadrian
Hadrian
Hadrian , was Roman Emperor from 117 to 138. He is best known for building Hadrian's Wall, which marked the northern limit of Roman Britain. In Rome, he re-built the Pantheon and constructed the Temple of Venus and Roma. In addition to being emperor, Hadrian was a humanist and was philhellene in...

, based on Straton authorship of a poem about the doctor Artemidorus Capito, a contemporary of Hadrian. Straton is mentioned by Diogenes Laertius
Diogenes Laertius
Diogenes Laertius was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Nothing is known about his life, but his surviving Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is one of the principal surviving sources for the history of Greek philosophy.-Life:Nothing is definitively known about his life...

, at the beginning of the 3rd century AD.

Straton assembled the anthology of erotic and amorous epigram
Epigram
An epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising statement. Derived from the epigramma "inscription" from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein "to write on inscribe", this literary device has been employed for over two millennia....

s called the Μουσα Παιδικη (Mousa Paidike, "The Boyish Muse" or Musa Puerilis).

Around 900 AD, a Byzantine
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...

 scholar named Constantine Cephalas compiled pieces of several Greek anthologies, including The Boyish Muse, to make a comprehensive collection of Greek epigrams. Since there is no other textual proof, we do not know if The Boyish Muse was taken whole, or if a selection was made from it, or if Cephalas maintained the order of the original anthology, or how much of it is original.

Cephalas's collection was revised, divided into specialized anthologies, adapted for school use, and generally much copied. In 1301 AD, a scholar named Maximus Planudes
Maximus Planudes
Maximus Planudes, less often Maximos Planoudes , Byzantine grammarian and theologian, flourished during the reigns of Michael VIII Palaeologus and Andronicus II Palaeologus. He was born at Nicomedia in Bithynia, but the greater part of his life was spent in Constantinople, where as a monk he...

 put together a bowdlerized
Thomas Bowdler
Thomas Bowdler was an English physician who published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work, edited by his sister Harriet, intended to be more appropriate for 19th century women and children than the original....

 version of the Cephalan book, which became very popular in the Greek part of the οiκουμένη. When the Ottomans
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

 conquered the remains of the Byzantine empire
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...

, many Greek scholars brought versions of Planudes' version with them into exile in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. The Greeks became teachers to Italian scholars. In 1494 they printed an edition of the Planudean book, the Florilegium Diversorum Epigrammatum, in Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

.

Most of what we know of Straton's work comes instead from a manuscript copied around 980 AD, which preserved many of the poems from the earlier Cephalan anthology. This manuscript was discovered in the library of the Counts Palatine
Palatine
A palatine or palatinus is a high-level official attached to imperial or royal courts in Europe since Roman times...

 in Heidelberg
Heidelberg
-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...

 in 1606 or 1607, by a young visiting scholar named Claudius Salmasius
Claudius Salmasius
Claudius Salmasius is the Latin name of Claude Saumaise , a French classical scholar.-Life:Salmasius was born at Semur-en-Auxois in Burgundy. His father, a counsellor of the parlement of Dijon, sent him, at the age of sixteen, to Paris, where he became intimate with Isaac Casaubon...

, now called the Palatine Anthology
Palatine Anthology
The Palatine Anthology is the collection of Greek poems and epigrams discovered in 1606 in the Palating Library in Heidelberg. It is based on the lost collection of Constantine Cephalas of the 10th century, which has been composed using older anthologies. It contains material from the 7th century...

. There is no clear record of how it got there, but a visiting Italian scholar probably left it. About the middle of the 16th century, the Roman
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

 scholar and antiquarian
Antiquarian
An antiquarian or antiquary is an aficionado or student of antiquities or things of the past. More specifically, the term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient objects of art or science, archaeological and historic sites, or historic archives and manuscripts...

 Fulvio Orsini
Fulvio Orsini
Fulvio Orsini was an Italian humanist, historian, and archaeologist. He was a scion of the Orsini family, one of the oldest, most illustrious, and for centuries most powerful of the Roman princely families, whose origins, when stripped of legend, can be traced back to a certain Ursus de Paro,...

 (1529–1600) had seen and mentioned such a manuscript, then in the possession of one Angelo Colloti.

The newly discovered poems in the Palatine version were copied out by Salmasius, and he began to circulate clandestine manuscript copies as the Anthologia Inedita. His copy was later published: first in 1776 when Richard François Philippe Brunck
Richard François Philippe Brunck
Richard François Philippe Brunck was a French classical scholar.-Biography:Brunck was born in Strasbourg, France, educated at the Jesuits' College in Paris, and took part in the Seven Years' War as military commissary. At the age of thirty he returned to Strasbourg to resume his studies,...

 included it in his Analecta; and then the full Palatine Anthology
Palatine Anthology
The Palatine Anthology is the collection of Greek poems and epigrams discovered in 1606 in the Palating Library in Heidelberg. It is based on the lost collection of Constantine Cephalas of the 10th century, which has been composed using older anthologies. It contains material from the 7th century...

 was published by F. Jacobs
Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs
Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs , German classical scholar, was born at Gotha. After studying philology and theology at Jena and Göttingen, in 1785 he became teacher in the gymnasium of his native town, and in 1802 was appointed to an office in the public library...

 as the Anthologia Graeca
Greek Anthology
The Greek Anthology is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that span the classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature...

(13 vols. 1794 - 1803; revised 1813 - 1817). The remains of Straton's The Boyish Muse became Book 12 in Jacob's critical Anthologia Graeca edition.

Because of its taboo subject matter, until the mid-20th century Straton's work was generally left untranslated, translated only into Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

, published in censored
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...

 forms, or translated only in private editions. These translations helped form the Greek core of influential homosexual poetry anthologies, such as Elisar von Kupffer
Elisar von Kupffer
Elisar von Kupffer was an artist, anthologist, poet, historian, translator, and playwright. He used the pseudonym 'Elisarion' for much of his writing.He studied at St. Petersburg and then Berlin...

's Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (1899) and Edward Carpenter
Edward Carpenter
Edward Carpenter was an English socialist poet, socialist philosopher, anthologist, and early gay activist....

's Iolaus (1908). New translations of Straton's 'Book 12' were later published by poets such as Roger Peyrefitte
Roger Peyrefitte
Roger Peyrefitte was a French diplomat, writer of bestseller novels and gossipy non-fiction, and a defender of gay rights.-Life and work:...

 and Salvatore Quasimodo
Salvatore Quasimodo
Salvatore Quasimodo was an Italian author and poet. In 1959 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times". Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he is one of the foremost Italian poets...

.

The first complete verse translation from Greek into English of Straton's surviving anthology of poems was published by Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 in 2001 as Puerilities. This collection contains 258 surviving poems (omitting one, an obvious later forgery), translated by Daryl Hine
Daryl Hine
Daryl Hine is a Canadian poet and translator.-Life:Daryl Hine was born in Burnaby in 1936 and grew up in New Westminster B.C. He attended McGill University in Montreal 1954-58...

, with Greek originals facing. The title is a pun on the one-time title of the work, the Musa Puerilis. Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso recently published in 2007 Lucia Floridi's Stratone di Sardi. Epigrammi. Testo critico, traduzione e commento, a book incorporating 105 epigrams into a single edition with commentary.

An article by James Jope in the journal Mouseion (2005) compares the translations by Hine and Peyrefitte and discusses how the poems can be reshaped in a modern context.

Scholars have noted Straton's anthology as a strong influence on the work of 20th-century Greek poet C.P. Cavafy
Constantine P. Cavafy
Constantine P. Cavafy, also known as Konstantin or Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, or Kavaphes was a renowned Greek poet who lived in Alexandria and worked as a journalist and civil servant...

.

Further reading

  • Alan Cameron: The Greek Anthology, from Meleager to Planudes (1993). ISBN 0-19-814023-1
  • Daryl Hine (transl.): Puerilities — Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology (Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation). ISBN 0-691-08820-9
  • James Jope, 'Translating Strato: The role of translations in the Study of Ancient Sexuality and the Understanding of Classical Erotica', Mouseion, Series III vol. 5 (2005) 47-57.
  • Stratone di Sardi, Epigrammi, ed. Maria Elisabetta Giannuzzi (Lecce: Pensa multimedia, 2007) (Satura, 7), ISBN 9788882356408.
  • Stratone di Sardi. Epigrammi. Testo critico, traduzione e commento di Lucia Floridi (Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 2007), (Hellenica, 24), ISBN 978-88-7694-967-8.
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