Dreadful Eros, before and after Meleager

Abstract

Chapter 14 exemplifies how Greek epigrams, despite their small size, develop larger topics, especially when interacting with one another in an epigrammatic series. The chapter argues, further, that Hellenistic epigrams influenced not only imperial epigram but Greek and Latin literature more generally. It examines a sequence of Meleager’s epigrams, AP 5.176–80, which represent a discourse on the nature of love. Meleager draws on Greek poetry, philosophy, and art and personalizes and focalizes earlier philosophical ideas about Eros through the lover’s figure. In turn, Meleager’s reshaping of philosophical ideas about Eros served as a model for representing the lover’s emotions in the later Greek and Latin tradition, including for Vergil, Propertius, and Ovid.