The imaginary works of Meleager of Gadara

Abstract Did you know that Meleager of Gadara (first century BC), the prolific epigrammatist whose Garland is the root of the Greek Anthology tradition, composed two books of erotic epigrams, the first homosexual (the work of his confused adolescence) and the second heterosexual (the product of his maturity)? Countless English readers have known it from the late eighteenth century to the present day, but it has no evidentiary basis. The poetic career it assigns to Meleager is a collaborative fiction at the root of his Anglophone reception tradition, explaining away the blended bisexuality of the transmitted corpus, and initially abetted by critical editions that chose not to present the text in manuscript order. This article examines the modern myth of Meleager’s books and analyses the mechanisms of its durability (two centuries and counting) in nonspecialist and public-facing scholarship, suggesting that it offers a paradigmatic case study in fake news about antiquity.