Stobaeus' anthology is a collection of extracts from earlier Greek writers, which he collected and arranged, in the order of subjects, as a repertory of valuable and instructive sayings. (9th century), that the work was originally divided into four books and two volumes, and that surviving manuscripts of the third book consist of two books which have been merged. At some time subsequent to Photius the two volumes were separated, and the two volumes became known to Latin Europe as the
Eclogae and the
Florilegium respectively. Modern editions have dropped these two titles and have reverted to calling the entire work the
Anthology (). In most of the manuscripts there is a division into three books, forming two distinct works; the first and second books forming one work under the title
Physical and Moral Extracts (also
Eclogues; Greek: ), the third book forming another work, called
Florilegium or
Sermones (or
Anthology; ). The introduction to the whole work, treating of the value of philosophy and of philosophical sects, is lost, with the exception of the concluding portion; the second book is little more than a fragment, and the third and fourth have been amalgamated by altering the original sections. Each chapter of the four books is headed by a title describing its matter.
Introduction We learn from Photius that the first book was preceded by a dissertation on the advantages of philosophy, an account of the different schools of philosophy, and a collection of the opinions of ancient writers on geometry, music, and arithmetic. The greater part of this introduction is lost. The close of it only, where arithmetic is spoken of, is still extant.
Eclogues The first two books consist for the most part of extracts conveying the views of earlier poets and prose writers on points of physics, dialectics, and ethics. The first book was divided into sixty chapters, the second into forty-six, of which the manuscripts preserve only the first nine. Some of the missing parts of the second book (chapters 15, 31, 33, and 46) have, however, been recovered from a 14th-century
gnomology. His knowledge of physics — in the wide sense which the Greeks assigned to this term — is often untrustworthy. Stobaeus betrays a tendency to confound the dogmas of the early
Ionian philosophers, and he occasionally mixes up
Platonism with
Pythagoreanism. For part of the first book and much of the second, it is clear that he depended on the (lost) works of the
Peripatetic philosopher
Aetius and the
Stoic philosopher
Arius Didymus.
Florilegium The third and fourth books are an anthology devoted to subjects of a moral, political, and economic kind, and maxims of practical wisdom. The third book originally consisted of forty-two chapters, and the fourth of fifty-eight. These two books, like the larger part of the second, treat of ethics; the third, of virtues and vices, in pairs; the fourth, of more general ethical and political subjects, frequently citing extracts to illustrate the pros and cons of a question in two successive chapters. ==Editions==