Abstract

This book investigates a relatively unstudied chapter of the well-known, competitive flirtation between poetry and the plastic arts, which is first evidenced by the fact that, from Homer onward, the vast majority of ekphraseis concern works of art. This flirtatious antagonism between text and artefact is connected with the fact that epigrams, in particular, display a symbiotic relationship with the monuments which they often caption. Epigram as the αὐδὴ τεχνήεσσα λίθο, although belonging originally to the archaic, epigraphic beginnings of the genre, became either a practical or a fictional mode, which was recycled in the literary, multifaceted epigrams of the Hellenistic age. Not enough attention has been paid so far to the idea that, in the Hellenistic period, interest in collections of both works of art and poetry books might overlap time and again. Part of the reason for this scholarly inattention lies in the fact that the evidence for such collections is scanty. On the one hand, later anthologizers selected, dismembered, and reassembled most of the original collections of epigrams. On the other hand, we are left with even less information about ancient collections of artistic objects. Prioux concentrates on some of the border-crossing cases of anthologies of epigrams that comment or pretend to comment on collections of works of art and explores their iconographic projects.