This volume presents a selection of Greek epigrams in verse translation, including many from the recently discovered Milan papyrus. The poets represented are Anyte, Leonidas of Tarentum, Asclepiades, Posidippus, Callimachus, Theocritus, Meleager, Philodemos and Lucillius.

Taking a wide selection of Greek funerary epigrams from the 6th to 4th centuries BC, this volume considers their historical and chronological contexts to draw out information about the society that created them. Using both Hansen's corpus of epigrams and wider examples, it gives priority to those cases where the whole monument ensemble is preserved, both text and image, enabling a much better understanding of the significance of the texts. A thematic structure within a broader chronological framework provides a valuable lens on the epigrams, allowing readers to compare particular types across the time period. After introducing the funerary landscape in which the selected epigrams fit, González briefly considers the literary form of epigrams as a foil for the rest of the book. The remaining chapters focus on epitaphs of individuals in the most significant stages of life, where gender differences are most marked: themes include untimely death, women and wives, friendship, piety and non-kin love. All epigrams are offered in Greek, followed by an English translation. The analysis focuses on the literary aspects of the epigrams, as well as on the information they provide about both society and religion of ancient Greece.

Lush Diodorus sets the lads on fire, But now another has him in his net - Timarion, the boy with wanton eyes . . . Meleager, AP 12.109 Encompassing four thousand short poems and more, the ramshackle classic we call the Greek Anthology gathers up a millennium of snapshots from ancient daily life. Its influence echoes not merely in the classic tradition of the English epigram (Pope, Dryden) but in Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Virgina Woolf, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and the poets of the First World War. Its variety is almost infinite. Victorious armies, ruined cities, and Olympic champions share space with lovers' quarrels and laments for the untimely dead - but also with jokes and riddles, art appreciation, potted biographies of authors, and scenes from country life and the workplace. This selection of more than 600 epigrams in verse is the first major translation from the Greek Anthology in nearly a century. Each of the Anthology's books of epigrams is represented here, in manuscript order, and with extensive notes on the history and myth that lie behind them.

Greek epigram is a remarkable poetic form. The briefest of all ancient Greek genres, it is also the most resilient: for almost a thousand years it attracted some of the finest Greek poetic talents as well as exerting a profound interest on Latin literature, and it continues to inspire and influence modern translations and imitations. After a long period of neglect, research on epigram has surged during recent decades, and this volume draws on the fruits of that renewed scholarly engagement. It is concerned not with the work of individual authors or anthologies, but with the evolution of particular subgenres over time, and provides a selection of in-depth treatments of key aspects of Greek literary epigram of the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Byzantine periods. Individual chapters offer insights into a variety of topics, from explorations of the dynamic interactions between poets and their predecessors and contemporaries, and of the relationship between epigram and its socio-political, cultural, and literary background from the third century BCE up until the sixth century CE, to its interaction with its origins, inscribed epigram more generally, other literary genres, the visual arts, and Latin poetry, as well as the process of editing and compilation which generated the collections which survived into the modern world. Through the medium of individual studies the volume as a whole seeks to offer a sense of this vibrant and dynamic poetic form and its world which will be of value to scholars and students of Greek epigram and classical literature more broadly.

The Language of Objects sheds new light on the sub-genre of Greek descriptive epigram, focusing on deictic reference as a springboard to understand three different approaches to the materiality of texts: imagination-oriented deixis, pointing to referents conjured in the reader’s mind; ocular deixis, addressing perceivable referents; displaced deixis, underscoring the subjective response of readers/viewers. Uniquely combining overlooked verse-inscriptions and well-known literary and inscribed texts, which are freshly re-examined through a cognitive lens, this volume explores the evolution of deixis in descriptive epigrams dating from the pre-Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity. With its original analysis, the book pushes forward the study of Greek epigram and current understanding of deixis in ancient poetry.

The book presents an analysis of communicative structures and deictic elements in Hellenistic dedicatory epigrams. Moving from the most recent linguistic theories on pragmatics and considering together both Stein- and Buchepigramme, this study investigates the linguistic means that are employed in texts transmitted on different media (the stone and the book) to point to and describe their spatial and temporal context. The research is based on the collection of a new corpus of Hellenistic book and inscribed dedicatory epigrams, which were compared to pre-Hellenistic dedicatory epigrams in order to highlight the crucial changes that characterise the development of the epigrammatic genre in the Hellenistic era. By demonstrating that the evolution of the epigrammatic genre moved on the same track for book and stone epigrams, this work offers an important contribution to the ongoing debate on the history of the epigrammatic genre and aims to stimulate further reflection on a poetic genre, which, since its origins in the Greek world, has been successful both in ancient and modern literary traditions.

This book continues the work done in the volumes edited by A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page entitled Hellenistic Epigrams and The Garland of Philip. It sets out to include all Greek literary epigrams composed before AD 50 and not published in those volumes, and extends also to epigrams ascribed to certain imperial Romans. Another author commented on is Leonides of Alexandria, whose poems observe curious mathematical laws. The challenge to the authenticity of much of what passes for Simonides and the associated historical discussion constitute one of the most important sections of the book. This edition and commentary will be indispensable to scholars of Greek literature.

Contains essential facts about the life, religion, literature, and art of classical antiquity.