Latin Epigrams on the Mind

Art Beck, who has spent the last several years translating the epigrams of the Roman poet Martial, explores the form in depth at Los Angeles Review of Books. "[I]t’s the Latin epigram that’s on my mind," says Beck. From this piece:

...In particular, I’m interested in its imputed origins in Greek gravestone etchings, an ancestry I hadn’t thought much about until recently reading a very enjoyable and informative book.

Michael Wolfe is a poet, novelist, essayist, film producer, and classically trained independent scholar. He’s published translations of an extensive array of ancient Greek tombstone epitaphs in a well-received volume titled Cut These Words into My Stone (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). His selection begins with very early epitaphs, found on gravestones and artifacts as far back as 600 BCE, and then proceeds through the Greek Anthology, where etched epitaph segues into poetic epigram around the late fourth century BCE.

The second epitaph in Wolfe’s sequence is anonymous, undated, and enigmatic.

My name is Dionysius of Tarsus.
I was sixty when I died. I never married.
I wish my father had never married either.

Wolfe wonders:

Were these lines approved by the deceased before his death, or did someone compose them later? A person who knew him? A professional epigrammatist in the pay of a disgruntled neighbor? Spoken in the first-person, the lines sum up a state of mind that readers in any age may recognize.

In my mind, a cautious understatement...

Read on at LARB.