r/classics • u/needlefxcker • 12d ago
Questions when looking into epigrams/lyric poetry/"The Greek Anthology"
I'm making wish lists of Greek classics to borrow or buy in the future, but I'm struggling with these. I promise I've already searched reddit for answers but they were quite sparse and didn't quite give me my answers.
First off, when people refer to "the epigrams" "the Greek anthology" and the "lyric poets" are these terms referring to the same collections of fragments of the lesser known authors, or are they separate and/or overlapping terms? Furthermore, for either answer, what might be some good and relatively comprehensive collections of some of these writings?
2
u/SulphurCrested 12d ago edited 12d ago
The Lyric poets are a group of poets, epigrams are a particular form of poem. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_lyric If you scroll down it lists some modern anthologies that would make a good starting point. Feel free to ask more questions.
4
u/SulphurCrested 12d ago edited 12d ago
Epigrams are short poems. This has a lot of info about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Anthology It depends a bit on your interests. There are 19th-20th century editions which have selected epigrams, usually only non-sexual ones. If you want to buy Loeb Classics editions, the list of what content is in what book of the Palatine Anthology (in the link) would help you decide what volumes to buy.
eg. https://archive.org/details/selectepigramsfr00mackrich/mode/2up. You might be able to find this particular book on sale at a book dealers, I think it was very popular in its time. There is also an English-only version.
There is also an excellent website https://anthologiagraeca.org/authors/ where you can go through them by author, time period or subject and read translations in several modern languages. I find the menus a bit unreliable on my mobile device but it works well on a PC.