Greek Epigram in Reception

Greek Epigram in Reception is a chronological survey of the reception history of the Greek Anthology, a Byzantine collection of ancient Greek short poems known as epigrams. Tracing the strange evolution of the Greek Anthology from the early nineteenth century to the years after the first World War, the volume analyses the complex webs of rhetoric that are spun as writers and translators brought their different agendas to bear on the Anthology's text, pruning it to meet their needs. An emergent mass readership became caught between opposing and rhetorically loaded accounts, casting the Anthology, and thus the ancient race on whom the British were supposed to be modelling themselves, as patriots and doting spouses or lovers of male Beauty, like the Decadent sensation Oscar Wilde. The after effects of this cultural war were to stretch into the 1920s, and still echo today.