Tears and Emotions in Greek Literary Epitaphs

Abstract

Chapter 11 examines emotions in literary epigrams that employ the motifs of grief and weeping, starting with selected funerary epigrams by Callimachus and Posidippus and concluding with subversive and renewed uses in Lucillius and Gregory of Nazianzus. The investigation is based on ancient philosophical and rhetorical theories and modern studies on emotions, including the sociocultural approach of ‘emotional history’. As a result, we can see how much Hellenistic poets were influenced by philosophical concepts of the fourth and third centuries BCE and how they reinterpreted their literary models to suit the requirements of their own times. The literary epitaphs of Lucillius, the satirist, condemn false emotions of presumptuous intellectuals in Rome during the first century CE, while the Christian epigrams of Gregory are shown to be inspired by bucolic and biblical motifs.