Archaic Greek Epigram And Dedication

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.

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

A delightful look at the epic literary history of the short, poetic genre of the epigram From Nestor’s inscribed cup to tombstones, bathroom walls, and Twitter tweets, the ability to express oneself concisely and elegantly, continues to be an important part of literary history unlike any other. This book examines the entire history of the epigram, from its beginnings as a purely epigraphic phenomenon in the Greek world, where it moved from being just a note attached to physical objects to an actual literary form of expression, to its zenith in late 1st century Rome, and further through a period of stagnation up to its last blooming, just before the beginning of the Dark Ages. A Companion to Ancient Epigram offers the first ever full-scale treatment of the genre from a broad international perspective. The book is divided into six parts, the first of which covers certain typical characteristics of the genre, examines aspects that are central to our understanding of epigram, and discusses its relation to other literary genres. The subsequent four parts present a diachronic history of epigram, from archaic Greece, Hellenistic Greece, and Latin and Greek epigrams at Rome, all the way up to late antiquity, with a concluding section looking at the heritage of ancient epigram from the Middle Ages up to modern times. Provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the epigram The first single-volume book to examine the entire history of the genre Scholarly interest in Greek and Roman epigram has steadily increased over the past fifty years Looks at not only the origins of the epigram but at the later literary tradition A Companion to Ancient Epigram will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, world literature, and ancient and general history. It will also be an excellent addition to the shelf of any public and university library.

This volume explores the significance of the physical materials and contexts of inscribed texts in Greek and Roman antiquity and their performative roles in ancient society from an anthropological and historical perspective (7th century B.C.E. to 4th century C.E.).

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

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 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.

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.