EDITOR’S PREFACE

...this was the orator’s primary aim. And I believe those were written by him—very dry indeed, but their brevity at least will recommend them even to those who are weary of such schoolroom trifles. Nor do they please me. Therefore, Hermogenes Hermogenes of Tarsus (2nd century AD) was a highly influential rhetorician whose works on style became the standard textbooks for centuries., who often had to be called upon, I have almost neglected, thinking of course that the rhetorical reader, without my prompting, knows full well that Hermogenes, the master of the art, and other technical writers should be consulted.

To produce a volume of proper size, I have added to the Pachymerian Refers to the works of George Pachymeres, mentioned on the previous page. Declamations the Facetiæ original: Facetias; meaning "witticisms" or "jokes." of Hierocles; not just those twenty-eight or twenty-nine very well known from the editions—the anonymous London one, those of Needham, Schier, Coray, and others—but 262 of them. These were extracted from the little book of nonsense by the grammarians Hierocles and Philagrius, to which the title is prefixed: Philogelos original: Φιλόγελως, which in the common tongue means "The Laughter-Lover" The editor uses the French "Le rieur" in the original Latin text.. Melissus Gaius Melissus, a freedman of Maecenas and a librarian under Emperor Augustus., the grammarian of Spoleto and friend of Maecenas, in his sixtieth year, set out to compile a collection of that kind of jokes. Coray Adamantios Korais (1748–1833), a central figure in the Greek Enlightenment and a prolific editor of classical texts., a serious man, almost a second Socrates, at sixty-four years of age, edited Hierocles and illustrated him with a comparison of similar anecdotes.

I, now heavy with seventy-five years, am publishing the Philogelos, testing it against manuscripts and the scholarly debates of critics, adorning it with a commentary—and burdening it too—ready to defend myself with those and other such examples (for even the Facetiæ of the famous Tacitus are mentioned), but also ready to proceed securely even without examples, little concerned with gloomy and peevish censors who, misusing the saying of Martial, will shout that "laboring over trifles is foolish" original: "stultum esse laborem ineptiarum"; a reference to the Roman poet Martial’s Epigrams (2.86), where he dismisses trivial poetic games.; for I myself am also, in my way, a laughter-lover original: φιλόγελως.

The basis of my revision was a handwritten transcript of a Greek manuscript by the learned Minoides Mynas Constantine Minoides Mynas (1788–1859) was a Greek scholar commissioned by the French government to search for ancient manuscripts in Eastern monasteries., who [brought] it...