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Some Early Greek Epitaphs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
In Westminster Abbey lie the bones of Ben Jonson; in the little parish church of Cookham in Berkshire lies a local squire named Arthur Babham, who died and was buried at about the same time as the poet. The world knows Ben Jonson, and his epitaph. Who has heard of his contemporary? Yet listen to the first lines of the Cookham memorial:
To Cristall Skyes let Fame resounde the Vertuous Praise aright Of Arthor Babham here depicte in alabastere bright.
Ten further lines record his lineage, his offspring, the expense of his monument, and his ultimate happy destination; but to the reader they mean little, compared with the directness of the words on the Abbey flagstone: ‘O rare Ben Ihonson.’
There is a similar simplicity and lack of pretension in certain of the sepulchral epigrams on individuals contained in Book VII of the Greek Anthology, which marks them out among the multitude of ‘poetical exercises in the form of epitaphs’ (to quote the introduction of the Loeb edition) which form the greater part of the collection. Some of these outstanding examples are attributed, though often on very slender evidence, to famous poets from the seventh to the fifth centuries, while others are anonymous (
); but, contrasted with the mass of rhetorical questions, imaginative speculations, and elaborate descriptions which so often detract from the compositions of the later writers, the epitaphs in question all have this common virtue, that the bare facts to be commemorated are stated briefly and lucidly, some-times with the transcendent clarity of great poetry, sometimes with a halting plainness which has equal power to transfix the mind.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1947
References
Page 127 note 1 Loeb edition, vol. ii; the numbers of the epigrams quoted are all from this edition. For these epigrams and all the others quoted here the translations, whose inadequacy the writer is the first to regret, are given only for the purpose of assisting those readers who may be unfamiliar with the dialect forms used.
Page 128 note 1 Herod, i. 87. 4: 
Page 128 note 2 Collignon, , Les statues funéraires dans l'art grecque, p. 33 f. and fig. 13; cf.Google ScholarRaubitschek, , Bull. Bulgare, xii, 1938, p. 146.Google Scholar
Page 128 note 3 Richter, , Archaic Attic Gravestones, pp. 43 ff., fig. 65.Google Scholar
Page 129 note 1 Inscriptiones Graecae (hereafter abbreviated to IG.), i2. 1012: Richter, op. cit., p. 44f.
Page 129 note 2 Ibid. i2. 1025; Conze, , Attische Grabreliefs, i, No. 1, Pl. 1.Google Scholar
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Page 130 note 1 Daly, , Hesperia, viii, 1939, pp. 165 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Page 131 note 1 IG. ix. 1. 521.
Page 131 note 2 Ibid. ix. 2. 270; cf. also ibid. ix. 2. 255, where the last line repeats line 2 of the Attic epigram on Tettichos, and the stele published by Herzfeld, , Bulletin de correspondence helénique, xxxv, 1911, p. 239, No. 8.Google Scholar
Page 131 note 3 Cf. Wace, 
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Page 131 note 4 Nos. 229, 230, 432, 433, 434, 435.
Page 131 note 5 IG. v. 1. 701, 702, 1124. There is a late-sixth-century two-line verse on a Spartan named Pleistias, of interest because it records the career of one who, born in Sparta, was educated at Athens, and died in Eretria, where his monument was found (IG. xii. 9. 286).
Page 132 note 1 Ibid, vii, Nos. 600, 596, 593; cf. Keramopoullos, Έφ Άρχ. 1920, pp. 1 ff.
Page 132 note 2 IG. vii. 579; cf. Richter, , Kouroi, p. 77 f., figs. 57–8.Google Scholar