The Greek Anthology And Other Ancient Greek Epigrams

A selection from the original Greek anthology assembled by Byzantine scholars in the 10th century. The poems are drawn from all over the Greek-speaking world and range over 13 centuries.

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.

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.

Lush Diodorus sets the lads on fire, But now another has him in his net - Timarion, the boy with wanton eyes . . . Meleager, AP 12.109 Encompassing four thousand short poems and more, the ramshackle classic we call the Greek Anthology gathers up a millennium of snapshots from ancient daily life. Its influence echoes not merely in the classic tradition of the English epigram (Pope, Dryden) but in Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Virgina Woolf, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and the poets of the First World War. Its variety is almost infinite. Victorious armies, ruined cities, and Olympic champions share space with lovers' quarrels and laments for the untimely dead - but also with jokes and riddles, art appreciation, potted biographies of authors, and scenes from country life and the workplace. This selection of more than 600 epigrams in verse is the first major translation from the Greek Anthology in nearly a century. Each of the Anthology's books of epigrams is represented here, in manuscript order, and with extensive notes on the history and myth that lie behind them.

Lush Diodorus sets the lads on fire, But now another has him in his net - Timarion, the boy with wanton eyes . . . Meleager, AP 12.109 Encompassing four thousand short poems and more, the ramshackle classic we call the Greek Anthology gathers up a millennium of snapshots from ancient daily life. Its influence echoes not merely in the classic tradition of the English epigram (Pope, Dryden) but in Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Virgina Woolf, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and the poets of the First World War. Its variety is almost infinite. Victorious armies, ruined cities, and Olympic champions share space with lovers' quarrels and laments for the untimely dead - but also with jokes and riddles, art appreciation, potted biographies of authors, and scenes from country life and the workplace. This selection of more than 600 epigrams in verse is the first major translation from the Greek Anthology in nearly a century. Each of the Anthology's books of epigrams is represented here, in manuscript order, and with extensive notes on the history and myth that lie behind them.