Art, Nature, Power

This final chapter demonstrates the importance of contextualizing epigrams into the sociohistorical circumstances of their era if we want to achieve a deeper comprehension of the transformations that various motifs undergo through space and time. The chapter analyses a cluster of epigrams on imperial gardens that date from the first to the seventh century CE, and shows how these poems reflect diverse views about imperial power, aesthetics, pagan culture, and Christianity. The chapter discusses first an epigram from the Neronian era, then moves forward to late antiquity to consider a sequence of garden epigrams from the age of the Emperor Justinian (sixth century CE). The chapter concludes with an explicitly Christian garden epigram from the reign of the Emperor Heraclius (seventh century CE).

Ecphrasis and Iconoclasm

Chapter 19 examines how Palladas in his epigrams turned ecphrasis into a medium for contemplating the tension between the Greek literary and cultural heritage and the sociopolitical and religious environment of his own turbulent times; in the hands of Palladas, ecphrastic modes are adapted to describe the dire realities of an age when statues of Greek gods were defaced, demolished, recast, or reconfigured by Christians. While ecphrases traditionally evoke the stable and essential features of the images they describe and interpret, Palladas’ ecphrastic epigrams pointedly focus on their enforced transformation and altered circumstances. His ecphrases thus become melancholy reflections on change.

‘From atop a lofty wall…’

Chapter 17 examines how poets engage with philosophers and philosophy in epigram, at times modelling and championing the views of the philosopher, at others distancing themselves sharply from their subjects. The theme is sufficiently pronounced as to constitute a thematic subgenre from Callimachus to the end of classical antiquity. Careful study is paid to individual poems representative of different periods and to the techniques most commonly employed, ‘praise’ and ‘blame’. The chapter further argues that in several epigrams poets employ the recusatio to disavow philosophy both as a genre and as a discursive medium and champion instead epigram and poetry writ large as humbler and superior discursive modes.

Epigrammatic Variations/Debate on the Theme of Cybele’s Music

This chapter focuses on a cluster of epigrams connected with Cybele’s cult and her priests and priestesses, in particular her galli (emasculated priests). In most of these poems, the galli make a dedication to Cybele that is related to the restraining of a lion in a cave through music typical of the goddess’ orgiastic rites. The chapter examines the relation of the epigrams to Catullus 63, which intriguingly comes before a string of negative or indignant portrayals of Cybele’s galli in imperial Rome and after critical remarks on the lack of control caused by her music in various literary sources. The chapter argues that Catullus reversed the motif of the lion’s encounter with the gallus in the cave, which was used in several epigrams to offer a defensive or eulogistic presentation of Cybele’s cult, in order to express an opposing position.

Tears and Emotions in Greek Literary Epitaphs

Chapter 11 examines emotions in literary epigrams that employ the motifs of grief and weeping, starting with selected funerary epigrams by Callimachus and Posidippus and concluding with subversive and renewed uses in Lucillius and Gregory of Nazianzus. The investigation is based on ancient philosophical and rhetorical theories and modern studies on emotions, including the sociocultural approach of ‘emotional history’. As a result, we can see how much Hellenistic poets were influenced by philosophical concepts of the fourth and third centuries BCE and how they reinterpreted their literary models to suit the requirements of their own times. The literary epitaphs of Lucillius, the satirist, condemn false emotions of presumptuous intellectuals in Rome during the first century CE, while the Christian epigrams of Gregory are shown to be inspired by bucolic and biblical motifs.

Death of a Child

Chapter 9 explores the interrelationship between literary and inscriptional epigram, principally through a study of GV 1159 = SGO 03/05/04, a poem from imperial Notion on a young boy who drowned in a well. The analysis pays particular attention to versification, narrative technique, the characterization of the boy’s speaking voice and language, and explores the poem’s use of AP 7.170 (attributed to Posidippus or Callimachus) as a way of enfolding the drowned boy within literary tradition. Attention is also paid to the debt of the epitaphic tradition both to Homer and to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. The analysis sheds light on what important features at stake in the attempt to distinguish between ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ epigram.

Miniaturization of Earlier Poetry in Greek Epigrams

Chapter 6 offers a diachronic study of Hellenistic epigram with a focus on the issues of thematic and generic variety and on the reception and ‘miniaturization’ of earlier poetic genres—particularly of small-scale poetry such as elegy, bucolic poetry and various kinds of erotic poetry, but also of didactic poetry—in Hellenistic epigram. The chapter finds that, although these developments are more obvious in later epigrammatists, their seeds can be found in Callimachus and other poets of his generation. The earlier generations still carried out their thematic and generic experiments largely within the framework of funeral, dedicatory, or ecphrastic and the new subgenre of erotic epigram, while later epigrammatists grew bolder and explored the possibilities of ‘miniaturization’ much further.

A Garland of Freshly Grown Flowers

Chapter 4 challenges the common view that Philip of Thessalonica was a second-rate editor in comparison to Meleager and illustrates, on the basis of select examples, the intricacy of his design. The alphabetical organization of his Garland, long thought to be purely mechanical, is shown to be a technical constraint that the author imposed upon himself so as to outdo the achievements of his predecessor: Within this external framework, Philip employed subtler modes of arrangement similar to Meleager’s editorial technique: juxtaposition of model and variation; interweaving of epigrams anchored in thematic, structural, verbal, or intertextual links; epigrammatic pairs or series on the same topic distributed across the collection; and clusters on key themes within individual letter groups.

Lessons in Reading and Ideology

Chapter 3 explores the transmission of Greek epigrams outside poetic books, that is, in compilations of texts designed to satisfy an individual’s needs and not for widespread distribution. Therefore the chapter analyses in particular the papyri with selections of and excerpts from literary texts assembled for a use on specific occasions and following personal tastes, collections used in school contexts, as well as ostraca and templates for stonemasons. The chapter detects in such Hellenistic ‘paraliterary’ contexts resonances of contemporary literary production and argues that already in the third century BCE school anthologies trained young readers in the sequential reading of epigrams and served as a means of disseminating Ptolemaic ideology.

Greek Skoptic Epigram, Ecphrasis, and the Visual Arts

Chapter 18 explores the interaction of skoptic epigram with the ecphrastic subgenre and the visual arts. It argues that skoptic epigram satirizes unskilled artists or the subject of their works of art, reversing ecphrastic topoi; sometimes motifs and devices closely tied with specific works of art or iconographic motifs are adapted, altering the role that they hold in ecphrastic models. In spite of its jocular character, skoptic epigram thus elicits the same kind of response prompted by an actual ecphrastic epigram, since it implicitly requests its audience to supplement the poet’s words with mental images of specific iconographic models. Such a visualisation serves the purpose of enhancing the effect of the joke.