Epigrams are literally “inscriptions.”* An epitaph, the earliest form of epigram, is an inscription “on a tomb” (epi- and taphos). In both cases, the name explains the poetic form — its origins and its most striking characteristic, brevity. Verses inscribed on an object, whether a marker for a grave or an offering to the gods, had to be short to fit a limited surface. Practical considerations (the cost of stone or metal, the labor of engraving) had literary consequences. Greek poets learned to exploit the limitations of space, to use this miniature laboratory for experimenting with extreme compression in meaning, allusion, plot, and character. The poems that emerged from this centuries-long development shine diamond-hard, with a brilliant attraction for readers as well as translators. Hence, the gems here.
The meter and wording of ancient epigrams are shared to a great extent with the other extreme in Greek poetic production, the grand and very lengthy heroic epics. At first sight, the Iliad and Odyssey may seem to have little to do with a few inscribed lines on a pot or gravestone. The epics were originally composed in live performance, using a highly refined yet flexible system of set phrases that enabled the oral poet to elaborate and expand any episode as he or she saw fit (or that day’s audience demanded). Repetition — of words, motifs, typical scenes and incidents — lay at the heart of this technique. Epic is poetry made for public re-performance. Epigrams, on the other hand, seem designed for private reading, once. Rather than depending on an audience’s knowledge of old stories and its desire to hear more, they offer information, to be encountered, considered, and then passed by. If epic is timeless myth, epigram is news. Whereas the archetypal scene of epic performance features a bard who enchants crowds of listeners, that of epigram, and the epitaph in particular, is the vision of a traveler who comes upon a solitary tomb and reads on the gravestone (or is told by it, for some stones “speak”) the barest sketch of a person’s life.
Yet metrically, epic and epigram differ at most by only three syllables. The hexameter line of Homeric poetry can be represented as six “feet,” the first five starting with a long syllable followed by two short ones or another long one. The final foot has two syllables, the last of which is either long or short. Thus, the first line of the Odyssey scans:
— ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ — ˇ
Andra moi ennepe Mousa polutropon hos mala polla
Tell me, Muse, of that much-turning man who many
…
And so it runs for more than 12,000 lines, each verse slightly different but basically identical, waves rolling onto the hearer’s consciousness. In the epigram, this oceanic quality of Homeric poetry is a distant echo. Its standard meter, the “elegiac couplet,” appends to each Homeric-style hexameter verse a second line composed of two parts, each comprising two-and-a-half dactyls, with a break between words in the middle, like this:
— ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ — x
— ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ — // — ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ —
In English, if the long and short syllables were replaced by equivalent stresses, the two lines working together would sound like this couplet by the English poet Arthur Hugh Clough:
Come, let us go, — to a land wherein gods of the old
time wandered,
Where every breath even now changes to ether
divine.
The pattern is internally echoic, even reflective, as if through the second line a portion of the first were being turned over in the mind twice. Most often, the second verse concludes a sentence. Thought pauses, and there is the sense of an ending. This makes the single couplet feel appropriate for mention of the dead, a concentrated cry gradually fading into silence:
— — — — — ˇ ˇ — — —ˇ ˇ — —
Ê kalon to mnêma [pa]têr estêse thanous[êi]
—ˇ ˇ — ˇ ˇ—// —ˇ ˇ— ˇ ˇ —
Learetêi. ou gar [et]i zôsan esopsom[etha]
Lovely the tombstone her father set up
To Learete, for we will not see her alive again.
This late sixth-century BC sepulchral poem — epigram as epitaph — from the northern island of Thasos is typical of many that have been found, their writing more or less intact, on sites across the Aegean and mainland Greece. Already in the Archaic period (700–500 BCE) such poems expressed not just the name of the deceased but an attitude, the sentiment of those who mourned. In the example above, the focus on the beautiful object increases the pathos, as the gravestone will never compensate for the loss of the living girl whom it commemorates. Since some inscribed poems originally accompanied life-size statues, the interplay among inscribed stone, absent loved one, and living reader becomes all the more marked. An exquisite archaic korê statue in the National Museum in Athens speaks for another dead girl through the epitaph inscribed on its marble base:
Sêma Phrasikleias. Kourê keklêsomai aiei
anti gamou para theôn touto lakhous’ onoma.
Phrasikleia’s headstone: I will be called a virgin for all time.
This title I won from the gods instead of marriage.
Ancient Greek poems never rhyme, but epitaphs like these make up for it with rich alliteration and subtly interwoven sound patterns, devices to be exploited in thousands of poems that followed later in the tradition. Homeric epic rarely exhibits such distillations of pure sound, despite its metrical affiliation with the shorter poetic genre.
Beyond the level of form, what unites epic and epitaph is a shared artistic concern: to craft the most memorable evocation of special persons, whether heroes or kin, and to keep their memory alive for the ages. The Iliad accomplishes this in verses that would have required several days to perform, while the epitaph takes seconds. Of course, the latter genre was never in competition with the former, nor was epitaph derived from epic — our first evidence for either comes from the same period. It makes better sense to think of the two forms as coexistent and complementary. Attitudes encapsulated in the short poems can summon up the ethos of the long compositions — and the opposite can also happen. In a striking scene from Book Seven of the Iliad, the Homeric poet appears to be already aware of epigrammatic style. He makes the Trojan prince Hector, speaking before his duel with Ajax, promise to return his opponent’s corpse, should the Greek hero lose. Then, says the Trojan, the companions of Ajax might heap up a tomb by the Hellespont, so that someday in the future a passing sailor might say: “This is the tomb (sêma) of one who died long ago, slain at his moment of glory by shining Hector” (Il.7.89–90). The two hexameter lines that Hector places in the mouth of the far distant viewer enshrine his own name, as killer, even as they obliterate his enemy’s. Except for that aggressive reversal, the lines would make a perfectly good epitaph. In reconstructing such poetic interaction, it helps to recall that many of the earliest inscriptions were in fact composed entirely in hexameters, rather than the elegiac couplets that became universal later.
This scene from the Iliad also anticipates a key development that eventually produced the poems you will find translated here: the unlinking of poetic text from the object it actually marks. Hector is quite clearly not talking about words on a stone (writing being unknown, it seems, to the composers of the Iliad). But he is imagining an utterance prompted by a material object—the tomb of Ajax. And indeed, as far as style goes, the imagined verses could be inscribed on the very object—so closely do they resemble extant epitaphs on stones. “Imagining what could be inscribed” best summarizes the poetic motivation for the majority of Greek epitaphs. Perhaps this crucial step was enabled by the increasingly widespread use of writing in the Classical period (circa 500–350 BCE). With the development of a reading public, the move from inscribing on stone or pots to “inscribing” a papyrus scroll, while fictionalizing a different material context for the poem, was an interesting possibility for the poets. This adds, moreover, a new dimension to the older dynamic of reading: rather than a one-time viewer reading in public the verses on a stone (reading aloud having been the norm in antiquity), now a private reader, far removed from any monument, reenacts, as many times as she chooses, the encounter with a gravestone or dedicated object. In imaginary epitaphs we see the earliest beginnings of virtual reality.
Another contributing factor to the separation of text from object might well have been the custom of the cenotaph (literally “empty tomb”). Greeks traveled far and wide as merchants and traders, colonists and explorers, mercenaries and citizen-soldiers. Not all made their way home. Deaths at sea or on distant shores were commemorated by the deceased’s family, without the remains. An epitaph in this collection, although composed centuries later, makes a good example:
I wish fast ships had never been invented.
We wouldn’t be standing here now
Mourning Sopolis, Diokleides’ son.
His homeless corpse floats lost at sea
While we bow our heads in passing,
Not to him — to a name on an empty tomb.
The separation of the object of mourning from the inscribed poem that remembers him provides a parallel for freeing the text from its immediate referent. It is curious, therefore, that Simonides (circa 556–468 BCE) is the earliest writer of epitaphs whom we know by name, for he is also the man credited with crafting the verses for several famous cenotaphs (as well as regular epitaphs) in the time of the Persian Wars. So celebrated did he become for his artistry in this genre that many epigrams were ascribed to him in later antiquity that he almost certainly did not write. It is as if the cenotaph habit, the ability to imagine the separation of object and verses, untethered the poet’s own connection to a particular time and place, making him a kind of floating signifier — whatever “Simonides” celebrated was implicitly important. Closer to the actual era of Simonides, only one monument is clearly associated with him by name. The historian Herodotus, born about sixty years later than the poet, tells us that after the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE, a coalition of neighboring states commissioned two inscriptions commemorating the Greeks who tried to hold off the Persians at the mountain pass (translated here on pages 32 and 33). The composer is not recorded (although later generations assumed it was Simonides). He is, however, tied explicitly to a third poem that he “inscribed” (or “commissioned”) to honor the seer Megistias. The seer, having foretold his own death in the upcoming battle, sent away his son but ultimately refused to leave the side of the Spartan commander Leonidas (see page 31 here). Herodotus tells us that Simonides’ praise was the result of his personal friendship with the deceased. Once again, the motif of dislocation seems to mark this pivotal epigrammatist, composing verses for people not there, or for one who could have got away.
Yet another social phenomenon, the symposium, played a crucial role in the development of literary epigrams from inscriptions designed for a particular place and object into widely circulating works of poetic art. This age-old Greek social institution that combined politics, entertainment, and ritual with copious wine drinking seems to have helped the epigram to morph from functional to fictional, growing into the most popular poetic genre of antiquity. Archaeologists note that some of the earliest burial sites of the Iron Age had adjacent areas for dining, so it is probable that at least one variety of the ancient symposium was funereal. Even today, it is Greek custom for the family of the deceased to gather right after a burial for shared drink and food; there are rooms specially designated for this within the Proto Nekrotapheio, the central cemetery of modern Athens. At the ancient events, we can imagine the praises of the dead being recounted and sung. It is not coincidental, then, that the verse-form most closely associated with symposia is none other than the elegiac couplet, identical to the metrical form of most Greek epitaphs. The small inscribed poems might be thought of as snatches of longer commemorative compositions, eulogies perhaps made on the spot. Conversely, an epitaph might be the kernel of a later song—it is difficult to assign priority in the process. What still puzzles scholars is the wide topical range of the longer “elegiac” poems that actually survive in this meter. The earliest examples, from the works of the seventh-century soldier-poet Archilochus, include speeches meant to rouse troops, descriptions of battle and retreat, a prohibition against mourning, and a call for heavy drinking with comrades.
At a symposium, participants could recite or sing elegies, but they might also recount the shorter epigrams seen in their travels or heard from others — or invented. That is to say, the dozens of drinking parties going on in any given night in any of hundreds of Greek city-states functioned as a social network for transmitting — and creating — short poems of this type, even before writing became widespread. The institution of the symposium also helps explain two other characteristics of Greek epitaphs: their themes, often related to love or drink (primary activities at symposia) and the quest for inventiveness on the part of their composers. Performing at parties was clearly a desirable social refinement, as we see from Plato’s depictions of late-fifth-century Athenian life, and the nearly contemporary comedies of Aristophanes (e.g., The Wasps). We have scraps of at least one songbook from the third-century BCE, apparently a papyrus scroll meant to help a would-be symposiast remember verses on an evening out. If we imagine the pressures for improvisation at such events, the need to find a new twist on the venerable topic of death, we can appreciate anew the tabloid-worthy tales recounted by some “epitaphs,” from a woman who meets death as she is undressing for her marriage night (Anthologia Palatina [The Palatine Anthology] 7.182; page 116 here) to the crew whose boat sank because a flock of cranes alighted on its rigging (7.543, page 113). These nest side by side with epitaphs for victims of less uncommon antique fates: falls down wells, earthquakes, house fires, roof collapses, infant diseases, shipwrecks, wars — and, occasionally, even old age. Nor does the knowledge that by Hellenistic times many of these epitaphs are literary artifacts rather than actual inscriptions prevent one from being moved at the death of a favorite horse (7.208; page 70) or a boy too young to have learned to walk in sandals (7.365, page 118). As always, fictions well-handled make life more real.
If anything unites the thousands of Greek epitaphs, it is the essential Greek trait of loving words. Not only are the inscribed words presented to the individualized dead, like the final libation at a tomb, a fixed form of the living breath to be breathed again when a passer-by recites. There is an unquestioned — though hardly religious — faith in personal post mortem existence, so that the dead speak back from their tombs (or, at cenotaphs, from afar). One can even converse with them, the way an anonymous visitor, in an epigram by Callimachus, questions the dead Charidas about conditions in Hades (7.524; page 81). Death, no matter how grim, can be talked back to. A human voice endures, small, wise, and flinty as the Greek landscape itself.
Philology—literally, the “love of words” — designates the arts of preserving, restoring, and interpreting texts. It was philology that ensured survival for these little memorials, even when the stones wore down and the old speech died out. The present collection continues an ancient scholarly habit of anthologizing epigrams and a Renaissance tradition of translating them. Already at the end of the Classical period, the antiquarian Philochorus (circa 340–260 BCE) was transcribing inscriptions that dealt with Athenian history, whether from tombs or temple dedications. Many must have been in verse. A collection of inscriptions from other cities was made about a century later by Polemo, a geographer and student of Stoicism. The crucial work of collecting and arranging these short poems, however, was carried out by poets themselves, starting in the years after the death of Alexander the Great, in the cosmopolitan capital he had established, Alexandria in Egypt. Callimachus, an immensely learned scholar-poet of the first half of the third-century BCE, wrote his own epigrams (brilliant poems, some of them translated here). Although we do not know explicitly that he also collected and edited epigrams, it is recorded that he arranged the works of archaic poets, such as Pindar, and wrote 120 books on the history of Greek literature, even as he catalogued the huge Library of Alexandria. His poetic preferences for brevity, conciseness, irony, and allusion fit perfectly the aesthetic of literary epigrams, and it would be surprising if he was not deeply aware of earlier examples and did not do something to organize them.
A contemporary, Posidippus from Pella in Macedonia, also labored at Alexandria under the patronage of the court of the Ptolemies, the Macedonian successors of Alexander. Well known in antiquity, particularly for his epigrams, he suffered the same fate as Callimachus — only a small portion of his work survives. In 2001, however, the number of probable Posidippan epigrams skyrocketed with the discovery and publication of a papyrus that had been torn up and used to wrap an Egyptian mummy. Of the 112 poems on the papyrus fragments — more than 600 lines of Greek — only two were known before, and they had been attributed to Posidippus, making it likely that the whole of the newly discovered scroll is his. The scroll itself dates from only a few decades after the poet’s death, and it is possible that it represents his own arrangement of epigrams, by topic: in the extant portion we find gemstones, winning race horses, and divination through bird signs among the major categories. The “new Posidippus” makes especially clear the way in which epigrams were packaged and transmitted as poetic “books” for a reading public.
Around 100 BCE, Meleager, a poet from Gadara in Syria, living on the Greek island of Kos, crafted a selection from such single-author books (and perhaps other collections), calling his anthology Stephanus (Garland). This pioneering arrangement does not survive intact. Large portions, however, were copied into later anthologies; at the same time, parts were lost, whether from negligence or changes in taste. Another collection titled Garland was produced under the reign of the emperor Nero by the Greek poet Philip of Thessalonica, something of an update and supplement to Meleager’s. It included works by Philip, his talented countryman Antipater, and, among others, Philodemus of Gadara (circa 110–40 BCE), the philosopher friend of Roman poets Virgil and Horace. This anthology as well came to be selectively copied into later, larger collections and has been reconstructed by scholars on the basis of such extracts. Philip’s Garland seems to have added to the eventual mix a number of “epideictic” epigrams — literally “show-off” poems — ranging from the description of art works to fictional epitaphs for Classical writers, invitations to parties, congratulatory verses, and invectives.
The snowballing continued through the long centuries of the Byzantine Empire. Constantine Cephalas, palace chaplain in Constantinople in the early tenth century CE, produced from earlier collections the largest anthology, determining the thematic categories that shaped succeeding collections — sepulchral, dedicatory, descriptive, erotic, satiric, etc. The last wave that brought ancient epigrams to our day stemmed, it appears, from this priest’s massive work. It is represented in various ways by two medieval manuscripts. The Palatine Anthology (Anthologia Palatina) was written later in the tenth century on 710 pages of parchment. The second manuscript on which our knowledge of the earlier collections depends was completed in September 1301, as its editor attests in the autograph copy now in Venice. The writer and theologian Maximus Planudes was Byzantine ambassador to the Venetian Republic. His reshaping of Cephalas contains nearly 400 poems that did not make their way into the Palatine manuscript.
Together, these volumes form the so-called “Greek Anthology.” But they do not hold all the Greek epigrams known to the modern world. Dozens of ancient authors, such as Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius, preserve several hundred not in either manuscript. Hundreds more have been found on stones since the rise of organized archaeological exploration in the nineteenth century. No single book contains all these other verses. A small number have been included in the present volume. The bulk of the poems here were transmitted among the 750 poems that make up Book 7 of the Anthology, the section on sepulchral epigrams.
A complete history of translations of the Anthology would make for a long shelf, groaning under large books. It would be much easier to list the writers in English who do not owe anything to it. From George Turbervile (Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567) to Alicia Stallings (Hapax, 2006), the Greek poems are a part of the English literary landscape, a necessary presence. Michael Wolfe’s superb and unshowy translations keep both the intimate quality of voice and the tautness and precision of the Greek. Nothing is prettified, but nothing is made mean. Edgar Lee Masters and Ezra Pound can be counted among progenitors of this style, to name just two Americans deeply influenced by the Anthology. George Seferis and Constantine Cavafy among the modern Greeks, Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo in Italy, found their way by different paths to similar re-performances of this poetry, stripped down yet evocative, either in direct translation or in imitations of attitude and tone. Wolfe’s versions rank with theirs. That the verses here speak to the twenty-first century prompts amazement, as well as the hope that human wisdom — independent, unadorned, illusionless, wry — might still be heard.
On the change in Athenian culture from oral to written, see Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On practices of reading in relation to archaic epigrams, see Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Poems in verse found as inscriptions are collected and edited (with Greek text and notes, but no translation) in two volumes by P. A. Hansen: Carmina Epigraphica Graeca Saeculorum VIII–V a. Chr. n. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983) and Carmina Epigraphica Graeca Saeculi IV a. Chr. n. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989). The history of epigram translation is partially covered by James Hutton’s two volumes, The Greek Anthology in Italy to the Year 1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1935) and The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1946), but much work remains to be done.