The genre of dedicatory epigram features an intriguing mixture of two media: in verse dedications, information is conveyed through the union of a material component, the physical votive object, and an immaterial one, the poetic text engraved thereon

This book explores dialogue between Archaic and Classical Greek epigrams and their readers, and argues for their often-unacknowledged literary and aesthetic achievement.

The book presents an analysis of communicative structures and deictic elements in Hellenistic dedicatory epigrams. Moving from the most recent linguistic theories on pragmatics and considering together both Stein- and Buchepigramme, this study investigates the linguistic means that are employed in texts transmitted on different media (the stone and the book) to point to and describe their spatial and temporal context. The research is based on the collection of a new corpus of Hellenistic book and inscribed dedicatory epigrams, which were compared to pre-Hellenistic dedicatory epigrams in order to highlight the crucial changes that characterise the development of the epigrammatic genre in the Hellenistic era. By demonstrating that the evolution of the epigrammatic genre moved on the same track for book and stone epigrams, this work offers an important contribution to the ongoing debate on the history of the epigrammatic genre and aims to stimulate further reflection on a poetic genre, which, since its origins in the Greek world, has been successful both in ancient and modern literary traditions.

Greek epigram is a remarkable poetic form. The briefest of all ancient Greek genres, it is also the most resilient: for almost a thousand years it attracted some of the finest Greek poetic talents as well as exerting a profound interest on Latin literature, and it continues to inspire and influence modern translations and imitations. After a long period of neglect, research on epigram has surged during recent decades, and this volume draws on the fruits of that renewed scholarly engagement. It is concerned not with the work of individual authors or anthologies, but with the evolution of particular subgenres over time, and provides a selection of in-depth treatments of key aspects of Greek literary epigram of the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Byzantine periods.0Individual chapters offer insights into a variety of topics, from explorations of the dynamic interactions between poets and their predecessors and contemporaries, and of the relationship between epigram and its socio-political, cultural, and literary background from the third century BCE up until the sixth century CE, to its interaction with its origins, inscribed epigram more generally, other literary genres, the visual arts, and Latin poetry, as well as the process of editing and compilation which generated the collections which survived into the modern world. Through the medium of individual studies the volume as a whole seeks to offer a sense of this vibrant and dynamic poetic form and its world which will be of value to scholars and students of Greek epigram and classical literature more broadly.

Written by an international cast of experts, The Materiality of Text showcases a wide range of innovative methodologies from ancient history, literary studies, epigraphy, and art history and provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on the physicality of writing in antiquity. The contributions focus on epigraphic texts in order to gauge questions of their placement, presence, and perception: starting with an analysis of the forms of writing and its perception as an act of physical and cultural intervention, the volume moves on to consider the texts’ ubiquity and strategic positioning within epigraphic, literary, and architectural spaces. The contributors rethink modern assumptions about the processes of writing and reading and establish novel ways of thinking about the physical forms of ancient texts.

By the end of the Archaic period, Greek sanctuaries were bursting with dedications, including many that bore epigrams. This study views dedications comprehensively as sites of ritual efficacy, and in particular it recovers epigrams' reflections of and contributions to that efficacy and restores them to an important place in the panorama of Greek religious practice. In order to reconstruct the Archaic experience of reading and viewing, the book draws on studies of traditional poetic language as resonant with immanent meaning, early Greek poetry as socially and religiously effective performance, and viewing art as an active response of aesthetic appreciation. It argues that reading epigrams while viewing dedications generated effects of religious ritual and poetic performance, and that visual and verbal representation of the dedicator's act of offering associated that rite with similar effects, thereby framing the experiences of readers and viewers as reperformances of the earlier occasion.

This collective volume contains thirty six original studies on various aspects of Ancient Greek language, linguistics and philology written by an international group of leading authorities in the field. The essays are organized in five thematic groups covering a wide variety of issues of ancient Greek linguistics, ranging from epigraphy and the study of individual dialects to various other aspects of the structure of the language, such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, lexicon and word formation, etymology, metrics as well as many syntactic matters and problems of pragmatics and stylistics of the language; a number of essays move in the middle ground where language, linguistics and philology crosscut and cross-fertilize each other with the application of linguistic theory to the study of classical texts. The work is of special relevance to scholars interested in Greek linguistics in general and in particular aspects of the Greek language.