Straton of Sardis (; better known under his Latin name Strato) was a Greek poet and anthologist from the Lydian city of Sardis. Life Straton is thought by some scholars to have lived during the time of Hadrian, based on authorship of a poem about the doctor Artemidorus Capito, a contemporary of Hadrian, being ascribed to him. Not all accept this identification; in the 1980s, a first-century date was proposed for Straton and, more recently, a Neronian or Flavian period has been suggested. Diogenes Laërtius, at the beginning of the 3rd century AD, mentions an epigrammatist by the name of Straton, who some believe was Straton of Sardis. Works Straton assembled the anthology of erotic and amorous epigrams called the Μουσα Παιδικη (Mousa Paidike, "The Boyish Muse" or Musa Puerilis). Transmission Around 900 AD, a Byzantine scholar named Constantine Cephalas compiled pieces of several Greek anthologies, including The Boyish Muse, to make a comprehensive collection of Greek epigrams. Since there is no other textual proof, we do not know if The Boyish Muse was taken whole, or if a selection was made from it, or if Cephalas maintained the order of the original anthology, or how much of it is original. Cephalas's collection was revised, divided into specialized anthologies, adapted for school use, and generally much copied. In 1301 AD, a scholar named Maximus Planudes put together a bowdlerized version of the Cephalan book, which became very popular in the Greek-speaking world. When the Ottomans conquered the remains of the Byzantine empire, many Greek scholars brought versions of Planudes's version with them into exile in Italy. The Greeks became teachers to Italian scholars. In 1494 they printed an edition of the Planudean book, the Florilegium Diversorum Epigrammatum, in Florence. Most of what we know of Straton's work comes instead from a manuscript copied around 980 AD, which preserved many of the poems from the earlier Cephalan anthology. This manuscript was discovered in the library of the Counts Palatine in Heidelberg in 1606 or 1607, by a young visiting scholar named Claudius Salmasius, now called the Palatine Anthology. There is no clear record of how it got there, but a visiting Italian scholar probably left it. About the middle of the 16th century, the Roman scholar and antiquarian Fulvio Orsini (1529–1600) had seen and mentioned such a manuscript, then in the possession of Angelo Colloti. The newly discovered poems in the