ABSTRACT
In ancient Greece, where every activity that could be made into an art was so made, it was felt that epitaphs on famous men, inscriptions on temples or on offerings to the gods, that these at least should be entrusted to an artist in words, that is, in these early times, to a poet. The great repository of these epigrams such as amatory, funerary, dedicatory, is the Greek Anthology, which in its fullest form is a very large collection indeed. They are drawn from nearly a millenium of Greek history and they run between the extremes of merit. The amatory epigram offers a wide field for speculation. The Latin epigram was invented by men of letters. There are a few of this type even in the Anthology, but it was in Latin literature that the new kind was developed. It is the epigram with a sting in its tail.
