Opravy

Essay

• From the fourth century BC on there is a cataloguing activity of the previous epigrammatic literature: are compiled, in fact, the compositions of poets of the past ages, both anonymous and renowned, by an editor that does not intervene on the material to classify but looks after them with a scholar and antiquarian endeavor.

• Thus, the first 'sylloges’ appear3, within which can be mostly found epigrams cataloged on a geographical basis or by author; which often contributes to erroneously assign adespoti epigrams to famous authors of the previous literature, as Archilochus, Anacreon, Sappho.

• Of this type of collection it cannot be found evidence beyond the end of the fourth century BC because with the spread of the Hellenistic culture and poetry was launched a second phase, in which the scholars and the Alexandrian poets take actions so it can be collected not only material of other people, but also their own.

• In this way, the stage of literary creation is combined with the regulatory and cataloguing effort typical of the Alexandrian age: the epigrams are arranged in libelli and structured according verbal features and/or related to the content.

• Of these books 1 For a story about the epigrammatic genre and its circulation see Degani (1993).

• 2 In the recent years it was undertaken an attempt to research about the contribution of papyrus fragments to the history of the epigrammatic genre, in particular the history of the anthology-form: see the morphology of the epigrammatic collections earlier than Meleager Pordominngo (1994), for the characterization of anthologies on papyrus Pordomingo (2007), for the anthologies in the Hellenistic age Pordomingo (2013).

• 3 For examples of anthologies of ancient authors refer to Argentieri (1998) 2-4.