The beautiful ‘Lament for Bion’, attributed to the later, second-century poet Moschus
uses the pastoral convention to pay poetic tribute to the deceased poet Bion who is
figured as a shepherd in a pastoral landscape. Here it is most apparent that the artful
singing shepherds of pastoral are only tenuously related to real-life shepherds in the
actual rural economy.
In the first century the Greek poet Meleager collected together a large number
of short poems from various authors and periods in his Garlandincluding his own,
which are preserved in a manuscript in the Palatine library in Heidelberg. In English,
the word epigram often has quite restricted associations. This is not so in Greek, as
inthe case of the following poem by Meleager ‘Upon a maid that died the day she
was married’:
That morn which saw me made a bride,
The evening witnessed that I died.
Those holy lights, wherewith they guide
Unto the bed the bashful bride,
Served but as tapers for to burn
And light my relics to their urn.
This epitaph, which here you see,
Supplied the Epithalamie.
(The Palatine Anthology, 7, 182, translated by Robert Herrick, 1648)In the Anthology there are elegies, epitaphs, short hymns, epithalamia (wedding
songs) and love songs. There are a few poems written by women, for example the
following epitaph composed as if for a funeral monument (stele)attributed to Erinna:
Ostele and sirens and mournful urn of mine
You who hold this small heap of ashes that belong to Hades,
Give greeting to those who pass by this my grave,
Whether they are citizens, or visitors from other towns.
Say that this tomb holds me, who was a bride; say also this,
That my father called me Baukis, and that my family
Was of Tenos, so they may know, and that my companion
Erinna inscribed these words upon my tomb.
(The Palatine Anthology, 7, 710, translated by Jane Snyder,
The Woman and the Lyre, p. 91)They vary greatly in subject, style and quality; some are imitations of earlier works,
like the Anacreontea. There is a group of poems within one of these Byzantine
manuscripts attributed to the sixth century poet Anacreon of Teos and in simple
metres derived from him. Scholars now believe these to be Hellenistic in origin or
184 THE GREEKS