This lively translation accurately captures the wit and uncensored bawdiness of the epigrams of Martial, who satirized Roman society, both high and low, in the first century CE. The selections cover nearly a third of Martial's 1,500 or so epigrams, augmented by a historical introduction and informative notes.

Greek Epigram in Reception is a chronological survey of the reception history of the Greek Anthology, a Byzantine collection of ancient Greek short poems known as epigrams. Tracing the strange evolution of the Greek Anthology from the early nineteenth century to the years after the first World War, the volume analyses the complex webs of rhetoric that are spun as writers and translators bring their different agendas to bear on the Anthology's text, pruning it to meet their needs. As so little was known about its poets, and because it stood for the 'Anthology' of the Greeks and their culture, the text became the battleground during the 1870s-90s on which normative and dissident interpretations of Ancient Greece were fought out. An emergent mass readership became caught between opposing and rhetorically loaded accounts, casting the Anthology and thus the ancient race on whom the British were supposed to be modelling themselves as patriots and doting spouses or lovers of male Beauty, like the Decadent sensation Oscar Wilde. The after-effects of this cultural war were to stretch into the 1920s, and still echo today.

Excerpt from Select Epigrams From the Greek Anthology About four thousand of them have been preserved in two collections made at Constantinople in the tenth and the fourteenth century, and the remainder have been brought together from literary and inscriptional sources by more scholars. The earliest of the date from 700 B.C., and they extend from that time almost continuously down to 1000 A.D. Throughout all that period they present little or no change in language or versification. A form of poetry which remained alive for seventeen centuries is unique in literary history, and bears striking testimony to the extraordinary vitality of the Greek genius. That vitality is not yet exhausted; it is still an influence over modern life, art, and thought. This selection of Greek minor poetry draws for us a picture of Greece in little; it is an epitome, slightly sketched with a facile hand, of the book of Greek life. A translation, notwithstanding its limitations and its necessary inadequacy, may give to English readers much of the substance, and something even of the tone and flavour, of the original. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Provides an introduction as to what epigram means and why it matters. Short content excellent for undergraduates and researchers alike.

This book explores how since colonial times South Africa has created its own vernacular classicism, both in creative media and everyday life.