Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era ed. by Maria Kanellou, Ivana Petrovic, and Chris Carey (review)

When John Addington Symonds first introduced Greek epigram to a previously unsuspecting mass market in his bestselling Studies of the Greek Poets (London 1873), he proposed that our principal source for the genre, the Greek Anthology, is in some senses "the most valuable relic of antique literature which we possess":

Coextensive with the whole current of Greek history, from the splendid period of the Persian war to the decadence of Christianised Byzantium … the Anthology carries us through all the phases of Hellenic civilisation upon its uninterrupted undercurrent of elegiac melody (341–342).

A minority of modern papyrological finds aside, practically all of classical literature is Byzantium's gift to us; what makes Greek epigram stand out from other genres is that the Byzantines did not just curate its ancient heritage, but also added to it prolifically and with distinction. Symonds's style may have been florid ("a tree which bears the leaves and buds and blossoms and fruitage of the Greek spirit on its boughs at once," 342), but his point is astute; not for nothing has Shane Butler (Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception [London and New York 2016]) recuperated him as a "deep" classicist, an expert in the dynamics of classical reception long before that specialization found a name.

The modern scholarship on epigram has taken its time coming back around to Symonds's perspective, but on present showing it will have been worth the wait. Building on a critical renaissance of epigram study in the 2000s (e.g., P. Bing and J. S. Bruss [eds.], Brill's Companion to Hellenistic Epigram: Down to Philip, Leiden 2007) that in turn was energized by important new finds on papyrus, recent scholarship has brought back into focus the genre's intimate and longstanding internal dialogue between literary fiction and real inscriptional practice (M. Baumbach, A. Petrovic, and I. Petrovic [eds.], Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram [Cambridge 2010]); and now we are seeing a synoptic approach that answers Symonds's challenge and addresses the long view.

Like the 2013 conference from which it developed, this valuable new volume gathers established and up-and-coming stars of contemporary epigram studies with the explicit aim of understanding epigram as a genre writ large across a millennium, from Hellenistic through to the early Byzantine revival of the sixth century. This was the age of Agathias, Julian of Egypt, Paul the Silentiary, and Macedonius, all of whom are amply treated; and perhaps also of Metrodorus, putative compiler of the Anthology's book of arithmetical riddles (chapter by S. Beta). With Baumbach, Petrovic, and Petrovic (eds.) 2010 as its modestly understated intertext, the co-authored Introduction is explicitly programmatic in foregrounding Hellenistic epigram's interplay with archaic and classical prototypes (chapters by J. Day, A. Harder), and in pushing for "a diachronic approach, which treats the corpus as an organic whole" (13)—leaves, buds, the whole fruity lifespan (Kanellou's own chapter is an exemplary illustration). What follows is a good try at slotting assorted critical angles under likely enough headings; not so much a handbook as, appropriately enough, an anthology, uneven (that much is inevitable) but also stimulating in its woven variety (and this takes skill). The more thematic of the section headings—"Writing Death," "Gods, Religion, and Cult," "Praise and Blame"—are such as might have adorned any number of selections from the Greek Anthology in the decades after Symonds took it public. Inscriptional-literary interactions are unsurprisingly well served (S. Barbantani, F. Giommoni, R. Hunter, M. Tueller). A couple of senior figures placed late in the volume ignore the brief, but everyone else is squarely on board. Just as in a garland of epigrams, individual readers will settle on favorites that can mirror existing interests or spark new ones (S. D. Smith on garden epigrams is a find I did not know I was...