Gideon Nisbet – författare

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 bring their different agendas to bear on the Anthology''s text, pruningit to meet their needs. As so little was known about its poets, and because it stood for the ''Anthology'' of the Greeks and their culture, the text became the battleground during the 1870s-90s on which normative and dissident interpretations of Ancient Greece were fought out. An emergent mass readership becamecaught 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.

Lush Diodorus sets the lads on fire,But now another has him in his net -Timarion, the boy with wanton eyes . . . Meleager, AP 12.109Encompassing four thousand short poems and more, the ramshackle classic we call the Greek Anthology gathers up a millennium of snapshots from ancient daily life. Its influence echoes not merely in the classic tradition of the English epigram (Pope, Dryden) but in Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Virgina Woolf, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and the poets of the First World War. Its variety is almost infinite. Victorious armies, ruined cities, and Olympic champions share space with lovers' quarrels and laments for the untimely dead - but also with jokes and riddles, art appreciation, potted biographies of authors, and scenes from country life and the workplace.This selection of more than 600 epigrams in verse is the first major translation from the Greek Anthology in nearly a century. Each of the Anthology's books of epigrams is represented here, in manuscript order, and with extensive notes on the history and myth that lie behind them.

A Book of Greek Life: The Ancient World Through Epigram brings its readers into the realities and imaginations of the ancient world through its social media - the little poems we call epigrams. Epigram captures moments from ordinary and extraordinary ancient lives, inviting us to work, play, mourn, honour the gods, and fall in love alongside the ancients. Classical translator and scholar Gideon Nisbet presents hundreds of freshly made translations, each of which sparks a short essay packed with insights about a lost world that shapes us even as we shape it. A Book of Greek Life is made for non-specialists and for browsing.

Satirical, or 'skoptic', epigram emerged as a distinctive new sub-genre of Greek literature in the Roman empire (the mid-first century CE) and flourished for at least a century. It was imitated by Martial, but it is now rarely read. In this book, the first substantial treatment of the subject, Gideon Nisbet rehabilitates skoptic epigram, introduces its authors, gives an account of its development, and situates it within its cultural context. He also suggests striking new ways of reading ancient epigram and examines satire's engagement with gender, identity, and power.

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 bring their different agendas to bear on the Anthology's text, pruning it to meet their needs. As so little was known about its poets, and because it stood for the 'Anthology' of the Greeks and their culture, the text became the battleground during the 1870s-90s on which normative and dissident interpretations of Ancient Greece were fought out. 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.

This is an introduction to the ancient genre of epigram, short poems literally written or inscribed 'on' an object or figuratively 'on' a topic. The authors set out what epigram means and why it matters, exploring its roots in inscriptions on stone and its literary flourishing in the Hellenistic world after Alexander. They trace its migration from Greece to Rome, where its most famous exponent was Martial, and consider the continuation of Greek epigram under the Roman empire in the so-called 'Second Sophistic'. The final chapter shows how Greek epigram achieved new importance in the nineteenth century as raw material for stories about the classical past.