The Yale papyrus codex has significantly enriched our knowledge of ancient Greek epigram, while it also sparked a lively debate around its date, authorship, and the interpretation of individual poems. This book offers the first collection of essays into this fascinating and elusive text.

P.CtYBR inv. 4000, owned by Yale University's Beinecke Library, is a fragmentary papyrus codex that comprises parts of six bifolia (24 pages) and contains Greek elegiac epigrams. Of the approximately 60 epigrams that are partially extant, two were previously known from the Greek Anthology, but the others survive nowhere else and appear here for the first time in a modern edition. In spite of the fact that there is no explicit declaration of authorship in the remaining portions of the codex, all signs point to a single author that can be identified with confidence as Palladas of Alexandria, who is known from approximately 150 epigrams preserved in the Greek Anthology. Because both the manuscript itself and the poetry that it contains are demonstrably from the early fourth century A.D., it is now virtually certain that this poet was active, not around the turn of the fifth century, as has often been assumed in modern scholarship, but almost a hundred years earlier. Palladas has a distinctive poetic voice - highly personal and topical, with a tendency towards bitterly pessimistic observation on the world around him. Despite the lacunose state of the codex, these traits are clearly on display in the new poems. Among other points of interest, there is a satire of the victory titles claimed by the emperors Diocletian and Galerius, a lament on the destruction of Alexandria, a curious mention of the sufferings of the Egyptian goddess Triphis, and lampoons of men from Hermopolis. This editio princeps contains a substantial introduction (codicological reconstruction, paleography, orthography, contents, metrics, authorship and date, and historical notes), diplomatic transcription and edited Greek text on facing pages, commentary, indexes, and photographic plates. It will be of particular interest to papyrologists, specialists in Greek epigram, and scholars of late antique history and literature.

The Language of Objects sheds new light on the sub-genre of Greek descriptive epigram, focusing on deictic reference as a springboard to understand three different approaches to the materiality of texts: imagination-oriented deixis, pointing to referents conjured in the reader’s mind; ocular deixis, addressing perceivable referents; displaced deixis, underscoring the subjective response of readers/viewers. Uniquely combining overlooked verse-inscriptions and well-known literary and inscribed texts, which are freshly re-examined through a cognitive lens, this volume explores the evolution of deixis in descriptive epigrams dating from the pre-Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity. With its original analysis, the book pushes forward the study of Greek epigram and current understanding of deixis in ancient poetry.

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 influence 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 complexities of epigram as a genre, and provides a selection of in-depth treatments of key aspects of Greek literary epigram of the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Byzantine periods. Individual chapters offer insights into a variety of topics, from the dynamic interactions between poets and their predecessors and contemporaries, and the relationship between epigram and its sociopolitical, 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 that generated the collections that 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.

Yale Papyri in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library IV springs from work undertaken at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at its Papyrological Summer Institute in 2003. This fourth volume of Yale papyri presents three groups of texts dating from the second century BCE to the seventh century CE. Editions are presented in chronological order, and include items such as samples of scribal training, mathematical tables and exercises, schoolroom work, letters, tax- receipts, contracts, and petitions. Contributors in addition to the volume editors include Daniel Markovich, Charles W. Hedrick, Jr., Jitse H. F. Dijkstra, Kevin Wilkinson, AnneMarie Luijendijk, Richard L. Phillips, Gary Reger, Shane Berg, Elizabeth Penland, George Bevan, Josiah E. Davis, Mariam Dandamayeva, Andrew T. Crislip, and Jean Gascou.

Letters were an important medium of everyday communication in the ancient Mediterranean. Soon after its emergence, the epistolary form was adopted by educated elites and transformed into a literary genre, which developed distinctive markers and was used, for instance, to give political advice, to convey philosophical ideas, or to establish and foster ties with peers. A particular type of this genre is the letter cast in verse, or epistolary poem, which merges the form and function of the letter with stylistic elements of poetry. In Greek literature, epistolary poetry is first safely attested in the fourth century AD and would enjoy a lasting presence throughout the Byzantine and early modern periods. The present volume introduces the reader to this hitherto unexplored chapter of post-classical Greek literature through an anthology of exemplary epistolary poems in the original Greek with facing English translation. This collection, which covers a broad chronological range from late antique epigrams of the Greek Anthology to the poetry of western humanists, is accompanied by exegetical commentaries on the anthologized texts and by critical essays discussing questions of genre, literary composition, and historical and social contexts of selected epistolary poems. Chapters 3 and 4 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/10.4324/9780429288296

This volume collects studies exploring the relationship of Christians and Muslims in everyday life in Early Islamic Egypt (642–10th c.) focusing mainly, but not exclusively on administrative and social history. The contributions concentrate on the papyrological documentation preserved in Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. By doing so, this book transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries and offers results based on a holistic view of the documentary material. The articles of this volume discuss various aspects of change and continuity from Byzantine to Islamic Egypt and offer also the (re)edition of 23 papyrus documents in Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. The authors provide a showcase of recent papyrological research on this under-studied, but dynamically evolving field. After an introduction by the editor of the volume that outlines the most important trends and developments of the period, the first two essays shed light on Egypt as part of the Caliphate. The following six articles, the bulk of the volume, deal with the interaction and involvement of the Egyptian population with the new Muslim administrative apparatus. The last three studies of the volume focus on naming practices and language change.