Gli epigrammi di Apollonide. Introduzione, traduzione e commento

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 influence 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 complexities of epigram as a genre, 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 the dynamic interactions between poets and their predecessors and contemporaries, and the relationship between epigram and its sociopolitical, 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 that generated the collections that 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.

2013

This dissertation offers a new analysis of the treatment of poets and poetics in Greek literary epigram from the early Hellenistic Period (3rd century BCE) down to the early Roman Imperial Period (1st century CE). In their authorial self-representations (the poetic ego or literary persona), their representation of other poets, and their thematization of poetry more generally, literary epigrammatists define, and successively redefine, the genre of epigram itself against the background of the literary tradition. This process of generic self-definition begins with the earliest literary epigrammatists’ fusion of inscriptional epigram with elements drawn from other genres, sympotic and erotic poetry and heroic epic, and their exploitation of the formal and conceptual repertoire of epigram to thematize poetic discourse. With the consolidation of the epigrammatic tradition in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, the distinctively epigrammatic poetic discourse that had evolved in the 3rd century BCE was subsumed into the persona of the poet himself, who is now figured as the very embodiment of the epigrammatic tradition and genre. In the first century BCE, as epigram was transplanted from Greece to the new cultural context of Roman Italy, the figure of the epigrammatist served to articulate the place of both poetry and the poet in this new world.

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2019

In the Hellenistic age great libraries sprang up accompanied by an unprecedented spread of poetry books, and a new literary culture emerged in the great metropoleis of the Hellenistic kingdoms, generating new products, attitudes and approaches, though always with reference to the Greek past. 1 The intensive study of contemporary and past authors was a typical feature of the age, and every serious author was conscious of having to face a public as well read as himself-or at least he supposed it to be. In addition to the specialized audience of the royal courts, there was a larger public of studious readers who influenced the character of literary production, as papyri have shown. 2

Trends in Classics, 2017

The paper explores the lyrical qualities of Hellenistic epigram not only by linking it to the lyric poems and tropes of the past but primarily by drawing on the modern understanding of lyric as genre or mode. Taking as a point of departure the notion of lyric subjectivity, it discusses the degree to which the poet's voice is involved in the different types of epigram, namely dedicatory, sepulchral and erotic. An in-depth reading of selected epigrams from the Greek Anthology brings to light the various uses and emotional effects of the lyric 'I' within the rhetoric of the epigrammatic discourse. In the archaic and classical ages, lyric and epigram, though sharing the quality of brevity, were basically antithetical genres, one being sung to musical accompaniment and the other inscribed to be read. The differences between them-adaptable context versus spatial fixity, oral presentation in song versus visual presentation for reading, stanzaic meters versus hexameters or elegiacs-offered clarity to their generic autonomy. In the early Hellenistic age, when archaic lyric was canonized in editions as poetry without music and epigrams gained in literary status through collection in book format, lyric, as a kind of literary relic,1 shifted in status towards mode, while epigram became an avant-garde literary type, creatively adapted to new topics and alive to experimenting with voice and trope. At the same time, of course, old and new lyric songs were widely performed in public and private settings and countless epigrams were inscribed on stone, but the limited survival of lyric poetry from this period in comparison with the much greater preservation of Hellenistic book epigrams signals a new aesthetic 1 For the term λυρικός which first appears only in the Hellenistic era along with the canoniza-tion of the lyric poets in editions, see Müller 2012, 72-75.