IV Epigram in the Second Sophistic and After

Extract

‘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.