ABSTRACT
The anthology of homoerotic verse known as the Musa Puerilis is an expanded version of a collection of his own poetry made by Strato of Sardis sometime in the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian. A Byzantine scholar named Constantine Cephalus put together the largest and most comprehensive collection of epigrams compiled up to that time. As part of this grand work Cephalus included Stratos collection; however he also amplified the original work by adding homosexual poems that he found in two other anthologies, the so-called Garland of Meleager of Gadara and the Garland of Philippus of Thessalonica. The Boyish Muse now forms the twelfth book of the collection of Greek epigrams known as the Greek Anthology, which is itself an expansion and revision of Cephaluss work that a prodigious Byzantine scholar named Maximus Planudes made in the thirteenth century. The Greek Anthology is an invaluable storehouse of Hellenistic epigrams, brief poems composed almost always in elegiac couplets.
