Epigrams from the Greek Anthology

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.

Gideon Nisbet is Reader in Classics at the University of Birmingham. He researches and teaches in ancient literature, particularly epigram, and its reception in the modern world. His previous OUP publications include Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire (2003), Greek Epigram in Reception (2013), and, also in the Oxford World’s Classics, Martial: Epigrams, with Parallel Latin Text (2015).