FROM THE INVENTION of writing onwards, the
inscriptions on monuments and dedicated offerings supplied one of the chief
materials of historical record. Their testimony was used by the earliest
historians to supplement and reinforce the oral traditions which they embodied
in their works. Herodotus and Thucydides quote early epigrams as authority for
the history of past times;[1] and when in the latter part of the fourth
century B.C. history became a serious study throughout Greece, collections of
inscribed records, whether in prose or verse, began to be formed as historical
material. The earliest collection of which anything is certainly known was a
work by Philochorus,[2] a distinguished Athenian antiquary who flourished
about 300 B.C., entitled Epigramma Attica. It appears to have been a
transcript of all the ancient Attic inscriptions dealing with Athenian
history, and would include the verses engraved on the tombs of celebrated
citizens, or on objects dedicated in the temples on public occasions. A
century later, we hear of a work by Polemo, called Periegetes, or the
"Guidebook-maker," entitled
περὶ τῶν κατὰ πόλεις
ἐπιγραμμάτων.[3] This was an attempt to make a similar collection of inscriptions throughout the cities of Greece. Athenaeus also speaks of authors otherwise unknown, Alcetas and Menetor,[4] as having written treatises
περὶ
ἀναθημάτων, which would be collections of the same nature confined to dedicatory inscriptions; and, these being as a rule in verse, the books in question were perhaps the earliest collections of monumental poetry. Even less is known with regard to a book "on epigrams" by Neoptolemus of Paris.[5] The history of Anthologies proper begins for us with Meleager of Gadara.
