Archaic And Classical Attic Dedicatory Epigrams

The genre of dedicatory epigram features an intriguing mixture of two media: in verse dedications, information is conveyed through the union of a material component, the physical votive object, and an immaterial one, the poetic text engraved thereon

This book explores dialogue between Archaic and Classical Greek epigrams and their readers, and argues for their often-unacknowledged literary and aesthetic achievement.

By the end of the Archaic period, Greek sanctuaries were bursting with dedications, including many that bore epigrams. This study views dedications comprehensively as sites of ritual efficacy, and in particular it recovers epigrams' reflections of and contributions to that efficacy and restores them to an important place in the panorama of Greek religious practice. In order to reconstruct the Archaic experience of reading and viewing, the book draws on studies of traditional poetic language as resonant with immanent meaning, early Greek poetry as socially and religiously effective performance, and viewing art as an active response of aesthetic appreciation. It argues that reading epigrams while viewing dedications generated effects of religious ritual and poetic performance, and that visual and verbal representation of the dedicator's act of offering associated that rite with similar effects, thereby framing the experiences of readers and viewers as reperformances of the earlier occasion.

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.

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 provides vocabulary and commentary to 85 Ancient Greek epigrams arranged chronologically from the end of the sixth century BCE to the middle of the first century CE. Sixteen named epigrammatists are included, as well as two anonymous works. Although this selection from the thousands of surviving Ancient Greek epigrams is a personal one, examples from the four main thematic areas of epigrammatic writing are represented: funerary/sepulchral; dedicatory; amatory/erotic; display/epideictic. Slightly more than half of the epigrams are by Callimachus, Meleager, and Philodemus (often considered the three "greatest" Ancient Greek epigrammatists), but there are many interesting and fascinating examples from other writers as well. In addition to complete vocabulary listings for each epigram, all poetic, Ionic, and Doric forms are given their Attic equivalents. The notes also explicate syntactical and grammatical aspects that may be challenging for intermediate students, point out many (not all!) of the various literary/rhetorical figures and tropes that are employed, and provide information on historical and cultural issues raised by the poems. In order to encourage reading of the texts out loud (an essential component of most epigrams' literary nature, and one that often works hand-in-glove with the literary/rhetorical figures and tropes used), a section is provided that describes both the nature of the standard meter used in epigrams, the elegiac couplet, and the basic rules regarding Ancient Greek scansion. Finally, English translations of certain epigrams (some of which are provided with two or more versions, for the purpose of further comparison) are included to demonstrate the variety of ways that these poems have been appropriated and reproduced linguistically, aesthetically and culturally in the past four centuries.

This collective volume contains thirty six original studies on various aspects of Ancient Greek language, linguistics and philology written by an international group of leading authorities in the field. The essays are organized in five thematic groups covering a wide variety of issues of ancient Greek linguistics, ranging from epigraphy and the study of individual dialects to various other aspects of the structure of the language, such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, lexicon and word formation, etymology, metrics as well as many syntactic matters and problems of pragmatics and stylistics of the language; a number of essays move in the middle ground where language, linguistics and philology crosscut and cross-fertilize each other with the application of linguistic theory to the study of classical texts. The work is of special relevance to scholars interested in Greek linguistics in general and in particular aspects of the Greek language.

Fourth-century Attic grave epigrams reflect a transitional phase in the evolution of the genre of epigram. They testify to a shift of interest towards social issues such as the family, the deceased's age and profession. In a turbulent period of restlessness and uncertainty that followed the devastating Peloponnesian war, the commemoration of the departed in private monuments became an effective mechanism of displaying publicly a new set of social concerns. It is within these contexts that special emphasis has been put on the composition of sepulchral epigrams, their gradual autonomization and sophistication. This book explores this decisive phase in the evolution of the epigram by reconstructing as many ancient contexts as possible on the one hand, and studying sepulchral epigrams as a poetic art on the other.