Erotic Greek Epigram: A Diachronic Approach

Despite its small size, epigram attracted some of the best poetic talents of antiquity, exerting a strong influence on Latin literature and continuing to inspire poetic creativity until today. During the last decades research on epigram flourished to an unprecedented degree. Greek Erotic Epigram: A Diachronic Approach draws on and engages with this renewed scholarly interest in the briefest of the ancient Greek genres. By shifting focus away from a particular poet, collection, and the epigrammatic production of a specific historical period, it explores diachronically erotic epigram from various interpretative angles, treating the surviving material as an organic whole.

Four motifs drive diachronic research encompassing a wide chronological span from the Hellenistic up until the early Byzantine era: the lamp, sea, and nautical imagery, the beloved’s comparison to Aphrodite, and Eros and the Erotes. By analysing how these motifs were shaped and adapted over the centuries, the book illustrates the epigrammatists’ changing attitudes towards the material inherited from earlier poetic tradition, and leads to a deeper appreciation of the narrative techniques adopted by them as well as of the inner dynamics of poetic imitation and competition.

Moreover, the scrutiny of the motifs within wider literary and historical backgrounds reveals the influence exerted by different cultural and sociopolitical environments on the epigrammatists’ work in the course of centuries. The book offers a model for the type of diachronic research that can be applied to other epigrammatic subgenres and other motifs, and to Latin epigram.

Maria Kanellou, Research Fellow, Academy of Athens, Research Centre for Greek and Latin Literature, Greece

Maria Kanellou studied at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and at UCL. She is currently Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Greek and Latin Literature of the Academy of Athens, and she has previously worked at UCL, KCL, the University of Kent, and OUC. She has co-organized three international conferences on Greek epigram and on Theocritus, and she has co-edited two collective volumes: one on Greek epigram published by OUP, and one on Palladas and the Yale Papyrus Codex (P. CtYBR inv. 4000) published by Brill. Another volume on Theocritus is forthcoming in the series Hellenistica Groningana.