Constantine Kephalas () was a

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Having survived the events that caused the fall of the Western Roman E ...

scholar known as the compiler of the

Greek Anthology The ''Greek Anthology'' () is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that span the Classical Greece, Classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of the material of the ''Greek Anthology'' comes from two manuscripts, the ''Palatine ...

. His life is almost entirely unknown, but he was active in the late 9th or 10th centuries, possibly as early as the 880s. His anthology, containing mostly ancient pagan poems with a sprinkling of Christian and 9th-century

epigram An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word derives from the Greek (, "inscription", from [], "to write on, to inscribe"). This literary device has been practiced for over two millennia ...

s, was an immediate success, and was copied, in part or in whole, during the following decades. However, the 10th-century ''

Palatine Anthology The ''Palatine Anthology'' (or ''Anthologia Palatina''), sometimes abbreviated ''AP'', is the collection of Greek poems and epigrams discovered in 1606 in the Palatine Library in Heidelberg. It is based on the lost collection of Constantine Keph ...

'' is considered to include an entire copy of Kephalas' work, augmented with other poems.

References

Sources

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kephalas, Constantine 9th-century Byzantine writers 10th-century Byzantine writers Anthologists Epigrammatists of the Greek Anthology