Not only so, but he mutilated
the text freely, and made sweeping conjectural restorations where it
was imperfect. The discrepancies too in the authorship assigned to
epigrams are so frequent and so striking that they can only be
explained by great carelessness in transcription; especially as
internal evidence where it can be applied almost uniformly supports
the headings of the Palatine Anthology.
Such as it was, however, the Anthology of Planudes displaced that of
Cephalas almost at once, and remained the only MS. source of the
anthology until the seventeenth century. The other entirely
disappeared, unless a copy of it was the manuscript belonging to
Angelo Colloti, seen and mentioned by the Roman scholar and
antiquarian Fulvio Orsini (b. 1529, d. 1600) about the middle of the
sixteenth century, and then again lost to view. The Planudean
Anthology was first printed at Florence in 1484 by the Greek scholar,
Janus Lascaris, from a good MS. It continued to be reprinted from time
to time, the last edition being the five sumptuous quarto volumes
issued from the press of Wild and Altheer at Utrecht, 1795-1822.
In the winter of 1606-7, Salmasius, then a boy of eighteen but already
an accomplished scholar, discovered a manuscript of the Anthology of
Cephalas in the library of the Counts Palatine at Heidelberg. He
copied from it the epigrams hitherto unknown, and these began to be
circulated in manuscript under the name of the Anthologia Inedita.
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