We are at a symposium in the house of Lysiteles of Athens in the last month of the 111th Olympiad, 328 BCE. The guest of honour is Charicles, a handsome and athletic young Athenian of good family, lately returned from abroad. Dinner has been lavish – the finest Copaic eels and the largest sea pike, Boeotian in their luxury – but this has now been cleared away. The slaves have distributed garlands of myrtle and roses, the pretty flute-girls have struck up their tune, and the symposiarch, master of festivities, has declared his rules for the mixing and drinking of the wine (old Chian, and chilled with snow). Next comes the question of entertainment. The company immediately rejects philosophy and gambling, but Ctesiphon's proposal is taken up with enthusiasm: they will play at riddles, each expressed in the form of a short and witty poem. These, then, are epigrams.

Epigram: EPI-GRAMMA, a text written or incised upon something. ‘Inscription’ is one obvious translation of the root meaning, and epigram began with inscriptions: texts carved in stone to fix cultural memory. Epigram and epigraphy, the modern study of inscriptions, are two sides of the same linguistic coin. The classical Greek epigraphic habit manifested itself across many different contexts. Inscriptions broadcast the laws and decrees of the city-state, the polis, and secured the meaning of monuments and tombs against a forgetful future. Cut into trophies and statues, they celebrated victory in war and sport. Inscriptions were unavoidably costly in skilled labour, and competed for the attention of the passer-by with many others of their kind. Official decrees and honorific inscriptions were as long as their elaborate phrasing dictated, but for more personal messages these factors could combine to create a pressure to keep the text short and to the point. A small minority of these inscriptions were in verse.

As was seen in the Introduction, the generic identity of epigram is governed by two senses of the Greek preposition epi: an epigram may be physically inscribed ‘on’ an object, or ‘on the subject of’ an object (or something else: a person, an event). This chapter is concerned with epigrams physically inscribed on a stone or other object. In spite of the fact that inscribed epigram comes first chronologically (beginning as early as the eighth century BCE), includes some of the most famous lines in Greek literature (such as those above), and numbers famous names such as Simonides among its exponents, it can sometimes be treated as the poor relation of literary epigram, which had its heyday in the Hellenistic period (see Chapter 2). There is a perception that epigram comes into its own once it has ‘escaped’, as it were, from its stone or other physical medium, and is thus at liberty to use its words to create a virtual object in the reader's mind (or not, as the poet chooses).

As Chapter 1 ended, with questions of collecting and reception, so Chapter 2 begins. The imperial physician and prolific medical writer Galen (second to third century CE) was particularly interested in books and how people used, or misused, them. In the course of a discussion of how a particular set of annotations found their way into the Library of Alexandria's copy of a classic medical text, the third book of Hippocrates' Epidemics, he tells an interesting story to illustrate just how avid Ptolemy Euergetes, king of Egypt in the third century BCE, was as a book collector. He ordered that, whenever ships put in at the harbour of Alexandria, any books their passengers were carrying should be confiscated and copied; the copies were returned to the owners, and the originals were placed in the Library. Ptolemy went further than that, though: he borrowed the official copies of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the Athenian authorities on the security of a large deposit (fifteen talents), promising to make copies and return the originals.

‘Epigrams at Cyzicus’: the enigmatic title of the Anthology's third and shortest Book introduces a sequence of nineteen sequentially numbered epigrams (one of them a broken scrap) purportedly inscribed by or on behalf of two royal brothers in the early second century BCE. Eumenes II and Attalus II were the sons of Attalus I of Pergamum, a small but culturally and politically dynamic Hellenistic kingdom in western Turkey. Just five years after Attalus II died, his nephew left Pergamum to Rome in his will, introducing the Romans to power politics in the Greek East. The Cyzicene epigrams are alleged by the introduction to AP 3 to have been incised on the stulopinakia – whatever they are – in Cyzicus' shrine to Apollonis, the deified mother of Attalus and Eumenes; but the introduction is a confusing text of uncertain provenance, consisting of a single sentence of extraordinarily bad Greek.

‘After [the Alexandrian era] comes nothing new but the jokes of Rome’, ‘corrupted by the lusts of Rome and the decadence of the East’. These and similar reactions to post-Hellenistic epigram – explicitly teleological and, from a twenty-first-century perspective, often startlingly racist – are typical of the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. Scholars felt almost as strongly about Greek epigrammatists under Rome as they did about Rome's own major epigrammatist, Martial (discussed in the previous chapter). His fellow travellers in genre came too late in epigram's history: they could not possibly be any good, and the public were advised to remain at a safe distance to avoid aesthetic and even sexual contamination. The interloper Martial had wrecked ancient epigram's manners and morals, and the Greeks who came after him could only sport grimly in the ruins: ‘The brothel and the grave are all that is left for Rufinus and his contemporaries. This revealingly overwrought response is essentially late Victorian, but its echoes are still felt; our final chapter will follow the trail of panic quotes back to John Addington Symonds and Uranian Love, laying bare the contingency and special pleading that lie behind any modern account of ancient epigram.

‘Reception’, the study of how the present recognizes and constructs its past, has developed from sober origins (the literary hermeneutics of Gadamer and Jauss) into a hot topic in contemporary classical studies. This rapidly changing ? eld resists stable definition of methodology or subject matter, and elicits firebrand rhetoric. Some practitioners are explicitly confrontational, exposing the historically recent ‘uses and abuses of antiquity’ perpetrated in the service of reactionary ideologies, and critiquing the disciplinary sleights of hand by which classics itself has come into being. Others use reception terminology to repackage Nachleben, the post-classical afterlives of ancient texts, or a broader ‘classical tradition’: the conventional study (blurring at times into optimistic hagiography) of the enduring influence of antiquity in literature and the arts. Recent trends are thoughtfully surveyed in Lorna Hardwick's New Survey, Reception Studies (Hardwick 2003).