Inscribed metrical texts are often marginalised in the study of archaic and classical poetics. This chapter integrates examples from c. 725 to c. 450 BCE with wider practices of intertextuality, where epigrams both share techniques with other kinds of literature and have some distinctive modes of signification. Early epigrams frequently use formulas to demonstrate the adherence of a dedication or funeral to traditional norms. The apparent decline in use of glaukopis on the Acropolis after 550 BCE suggests that these formulas were not just metrically convenient: semantics mattered. Epigrams also replicate formulaic phrases from both elegy and epic with their traditional connotations intact; such connotations enrich our understanding of Phrasicleia’s epitaph (CEG 24), and of ancient epigrammatists’ conceptualisation of the relationship between oral and inscribed poetry. Inscriptions, unlike other texts, also invited interpretation against monuments situated nearby. Early dialogues of this type tend to be cooperative rather than polemical. Examples discussed include Onatas’ signatures at Olympia, the tripods at the Theban Hismenion described by Herodotus, and the relationship of the Eion herms to CEG 2–3.

The introductory chapter is framed by the story of Ergoteles, a major Panhellenic victor and the only athlete whose epinikian ode and epigram have survived to the present day. The differences and similarities in the characterization of Ergoteles in each medium prompt the book’s main question: how does place, performance mode, and genre affect the representation of athletic identity? The bulk of the introduction outlines the angelia, the proclamation of victory by a herald at an athletic event. By stressing our – and ancient audiences – inability to access the actual speech-act, the chapter reinterprets the angelia as it persists in epinikian and epigram as an allusive representation, the modification and manipulation of which lies at the core of the verse celebration of athletic victory.

While the figure of herald and the actual angelia at the athletic site sit at the beginning of athletic praise, these real figures and actual proclamations are not the only heralds and messages that find their way into epinikian song and inscribed epigram. Rather, explicit and implicit references to the figure of the herald and the angelia are frequent in both genres. This chapter examines implicit and explicit heralds and messages across epinikian song and inscribed epigram. It focuses on the figure of the herald and the message and their ability to authenticate what are, in fact, secondary and elaborated speech-acts. By attaching themselves to the voice of the herald at the Games, epinikian songs and epigrams demand that audiences take their praise seriously, as if it were the voice of herald itself in the sacred landscape of a Panhellenic sanctuary.

This chapter examines a series of athletic dedications to trace both the evolution of the epigrammatic representation of the angelia - the herald’s proclamation of victory at an athletic festival - and to define the particular characteristics of the epigram as an athletic dedication. While a continuity exists between modes of athletic verse, epigrams – as inscriptions – and epinikian songs – as choral performances – function differently and interact with different audiences. Epigrams do not, for example, use large-scale mythic narratives to bestow glory on their patrons, but they do circumscribe the movements and voices of their audiences and use the religiously and culturally important sites of their dedication to add to their meaning.

The literary oeuvre of the seventeenth-century literary genius Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is genre-diverse: it includes plays, texts defending women’s intellectual agency, correspondence, religious-themed works, and, last but not least, poetry. Sor Juana’s texts are touchpoints for nearly all facets of colonial literary studies; her lyric works are invoked in critical conversations treating transatlantic studies, Barroco de Indias, New Spanish creolism, and feminist studies. Sor Juana’s lyric works evince not only her intellectual prowess, but also her artistic mastery of a variety of poetic forms, unequalled in her day or after her lifetime. This chapter examines the range of Sor Juana’s lyric writing in its totality, from her masterpiece, Primero sueño, to her renowned romances, redondillas, sonetos, and villancicos, contextualizing these in the scholarly and historical contexts out of which they arise.

A look at the commemoration of the Persian Wars, especially the Battle of Thermopylae, through commemorative epigrams. A comparison of Spartan commemoration with that of other Greeks, concluding that initially the Spartans did not frame Thermopylae or the Persian Wars as a struggle for Greece or freedom, but as an arena for demonstrating excellence and winning glory.

Pliny the Younger’s Epistles contain a significant number of letters where Pliny presents himself as openly hostile to certain individuals by ridiculing them or expressing his indignation. The individuals who are the targets of Pliny’s epistolary invectives or satires usually do not appear as addressees in the collection: the chapter discusses Pliny’s letters 1.5 and 4.7 on Regulus, 7.29 and 8.6 on Pallas, 4.25 on an anonymous senator’s behaviour during a secret election and 6.15 on the faux pas of Iavolenus Priscus during a recitation. It then moves on with investigating how Pliny evokes the tradition of scoptic poetry, satire and invective not only in those letters where one would expect it, but also in letters which, at first glance, present themselves as friendly or joking conversations with various addressees such as Ep. 2.2 and 5.10. Here, the scoptic tone of literary models such as Catullus and Martial is transformed into a different context of communication, according to the conventions of epistolography.

This chapter argues that the poets whose epigrams were assembled by Philip of Thessalonice in his Garland share predominantly North Aegean origins, and that their mentions of Romans and of visits to Rome should be taken as evidence of these Romans being their ‘patrons’ much less often than they were by Gow and Page 1968: rather, some at least of these poets were more probably from the propertied Greek elite (as Crinagoras of Mytilene certainly was) and made short visits to Rome either as envoys on behalf of their cities or as tourists, picking out in their poetry its monuments that had Hellenic connections. Only Philodemus seems certainly to have become a long-term resident of Italy, and his contrast of his simple abode with Piso’s mansion does not demonstrate him to be financially dependent on him.

This chapter aims at the sort of overview that the editors of ANRW then encouraged, and brings together the place of poetry in sophists’ education; an account of the many various poetic genres in which sophists composed, with citation of what we have from the only one of these genres to have survived, epigram; and epigrams on sophists composed by others.

This chapter argues that, whereas many poets in the Garland of Philip never use Doric, several do so to evoke either a Leonidean or Theocritean pastoral world, and sometimes because their subject has a Dorian connection – so Myrinus, Adaeus, Thallus, Erucius of Cyzicus, and Antiphilus of Byzantium. That Cyzicus was originally a colony of Corinth and Byzantium of Megara seems not to be relevant, since Doric appears only rarely in these cities’ inscribed poetry. Finally I examine the puzzling case of the five epigrams on Sacerdos of Nicaea preserved in the Palatine Anthology (15.4–8), of which three use Doric, two do not. I suggest that more than one poet may have been chosen to composed sepulchral epigrams for this grandiose obelisk-monument of around AD 130, and that the composer of the Doric poems might have been Philostratus’ ancestry-conscious sophist, Memmius Marcus of Byzantium

This chapter offers a short sketch of poetic output with special reference to the Roman provinces Achaea and Asia, and with an eye on how far we can differentiate ‘professional’ poets from virtuoso amateurs.

Chapter 4 analyses epigrams and objects between 100 ?? and ?? 100, and discusses how objects and texts engage with one another in expressing the idea of carpe diem. Rarely studied Greek epigrams from the Garland of Philip and texts by the Latin authors Martial, Pliny the Elder, and Petronius point to exciting interplay between the textuality of epigrams and the presence of objects. Besides more conventional literary sources, the analysis also includes numerous artworks and inscriptions. Particular attention is paid to cups, such as the well-known Boscoreale cups, as well as to gems. This interdisciplinary chapter makes a strong case for studying literature alongside other forms of cultural production.

The Introduction has three aims. First, it offers a new interpretation of the Seikilos epitaph, one of the most important musical documents from the ancient world. The chapter shows that we can use the Seikilos epitaph as a model for reading carpe diem. Second, the Introduction offers a short history of the carpe diem motif from Homer to late antiquity, analysing its key features and function. Third, the Introduction lays out the methodological framework of the thesis: it is argued that close analysis of the carpe diem motif can advance our understanding of presence, performance, and textuality. These themes have been central to literary studies in Classics and beyond.

Chapter 1 starts by tracing the archaeology of carpe diem. Rather than speculating about the origin of a motif that is already attested in Akkadian and Egyptian sources, this chapter looks at the Greeks’ own discourse of the past and how they constructed the origins of the motif. The focus of the chapter is the hedonistic epitaph of the legendary last king of Assyria, Sardanapallus. Greeks were fascinated with this foreign carpe diem text which seemed to precede their own history. In fact, however, it was by misunderstanding this foreign monument that they recreated its text; lurking behind Sardanapallus’ Assyrian orgy are Greek banquets and the present tense of performative Greek lyric. The chapter shows that the Sardanapallus epitaph allows for fascinating insights into Greek ways of reading epigrams. As the chapter discusses the reception of the Sardanapallus epitaph in authors such as Callimachus, Crates, Chrysippus, Alexis, and Rabirius, it shows how one of Epicurus’ detractors forges a false link between Epicurus and carpe diem, when he changes one word of the epitaph.

Chapter 5 considers ecphrasis less as an anxious competition between visual and verbal arts than as another form of sociable relations between persons and things. The chapter looks especially at collections by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“Sonnets for Picture”) and the two women poet-lovers who wrote together as Michael Field, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Sight and Song). Following the example of Keats, these poets used grammatical questions (whose ecphrastic uses go back to classical epigrams and idylls) to structure their encounters with works of visual art. Embodying vision in both conversational syntax and poetic (and sometimes typographic) form served their larger efforts to restructure social and sexual relations in the politically charged moment of 1848 (for Rossetti) and at the end of the century (for Michael Field). They sought to draw works of art out of commodity relations and into something that looked like conversation, repersonalizing and reimagining the forms of sociability in which objects and persons might participate.