L'epigramma ellenistico greco, tra performance e libro

Most of the literary genres of ancient Greece were originally conceived for an oral performance and then adapted to the needs of the book-based culture of the Hellenistic era. Epigram, on the contrary, was born as an inscription on an object and then began to be circulated orally, especially at symposia. It may have even been composed ex tempore, like the elegies and skolia of the Archaic and Classical age. Nevertheless, writing continues to be the essential feature of this literary genre. This essay aims to newly contribute to the debate on the relationship between orality and writing in Greek literature by fully investigating such a relationship in the Greek epigram of the Hellenistic and Imperial period. First, a survey of the references to poetic composition involving some use of writing, also in a sympotic context, will be offered, and different, concrete scenarios for the interaction between written text and performance will be traced. I will then analyze a series of epigrammatic texts that were interpreted as agonal couplets or sympotic chains and I will compare them with some ‘literary’ variations preserved in the Greek Anthology, to establish whether they are distinguished by specific stylistic and structural features. In the final part of this paper, I will try to reconstruct the possible contexts of performance for epigrams dealing with encomiastic or religious themes, and I will suggest that some poems may have been the subject of recitation during official ceremonies, perhaps even in an agonal context. This analysis demonstrates that epigrams circulated in a variety of ways, implying different modes of interaction between orality and writing. This was also due to the plurality of functions performed by this genre, and as such, generalizations fail to catch such a complex reality.