ANTONIO called MELISSA. - A Greek monk of the 11th century, erroneously called Melissa, from the title of his principal work, Μέλισσα, the Bee. The Melissa is a collection, in two books, of maxims and proverbs drawn from the Bible, the Fathers, and secular writers, on various points of morality, in the manner of the Sacra Parallela of St. Giovanni Damasceno and of the Florilegium attributed to St. Massimo il Confessore. A. left a more personal work entitled Χρηστικότερα, a kind of book of etiquette for young people, divided into 9 chapters.
Edited by Corrado Gesner at Zurich (1546) with a Latin version, the Melissa has had many editions. PG 136, 765-1244 reproduces Gesner’s edition. The Χρηστικότερα was published at Venice (1815) by Damasceno Papanagiotopoulos.