Ypsilanti, Maria; (2003) An edition with commentary of selected epigrams of Crinagoras. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The present work is an edition with commentary of selected epigrams of Crinagoras, the poet who was among the first Greek authors who wrote poetry for the imperial court of Rome and exercised a decisive influence on Latin court poets of the following century, mainly Martial. I have dealt with all fifty-one of the poet's extant epigrams but I submit only about half of them. The selection was not an easy one, in the present thesis I have tried to include epigrams which are representative of the subjects Crinagoras writes about and raise interesting issues in regard to language and content. The historical and social context of the epigrams together with a discussion about their possible dating is briefly displayed in the introduction to each one, explicit or implicit information about life and practices of the time is also traced in the commentary on the poems. The most important variants of the mss' readings, scholars' conjectures and, a couple of times, my own suggestions for difficult passages appear in the apparatus criticus and are discussed in the commentary, which constitutes a detailed, word by word analysis of each poem. I offer a brief survey of the usage of the words and expressions in previous poetry, starting from Homer, with special reference to epigram, and discuss the extent to which their present usage is close to or remote from the literary tradition, I also refer to ancient discussions of words and phrases which help to clarify their meaning or explain certain grammatical forms. Crinagoras' poetry is placed in the Greek epigrammatic tradition through observations about motifs and literary topoi, moreover, echoes of passages of Homer and other poets in Crinagoras as well as Crinagorean echoes in later poets are investigated, and parallel Latin passages of certain images or phrasings are referred to whenever appropriate. The main stylistic features of Crinagoras' poetry are summarised in the introduction as is also our extant evidence about the poet's life, social status, conditions under which he wrote and relations with other contemporary poets. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)

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