Epigram and the Theater
The entire Hellenistic vogue for epigrams on great literary gures of the past shares, as has been aptly remarked, “a common impulse with the great contemporary projects of literary classi cation, such as the Pinakes of Callimachus: namely the wish, on the one hand, to engage the past . . ., but also the need to assert control, to master a past that was viewed as unattainably, at times oppressively distinguished. That mastery, however, often involves wholesale abridgement, truncation, even evisceration.”1 Both aspects of this controlling relationship constitute forms of appropriation. Even the most sympathetic forms of epigrammatic re-enactment of literary history in miniaturized “pen-portraits” challenged the monumental sepulchral portraits that, in most cases, the pseudo-epitaphs on poets affected to describe; they also challenged the complexity of the deceased author’s achievements through the reductio ad unum of a pithy appraisal, adapting to the brevity of epigram a literary judgment of the sort that might otherwise be realized as an expanded essay. Needless to say, however, abridgement, truncation, and evisceration were forms of more invasive, and even deforming, mastery. At least three of the most important epigrammatists of the third and second centuries, Callimachus, Asclepiades and Dioscorides, dealt with dramatic authors (whether contemporary or of generations past), as well as theatrical activity in general, in a way that primarily stresses their self-asserting mastery. Other epigrammatists broach the topic with the gentle tone of admiration and celebration that most often characterized epigrams written for other poets of the past—for the third century B.C. we have at least ten epigrams of this kind celebrating dramatic authors.2 Drama, though, was certainly not the genre most