Saying things takes time; writing things takes up lines. There is always a connection between the length of a verbal utterance (in time when spoken and in space when written) and what it seeks to describe. There is a certain connection between form and content. In the terms I will be using throughout this book, it is a relationship (as yet undefined) between poetic extent and poetic content. How was this relationship perceived in Graeco-Roman antiquity?

Rather than re-counting the arguments of the individual chapters in concluding this book, I want to return to the wider perspective of number in relation to poetry. From the preceding chapters there emerge three strands which are worth crystallising explicitly.

Archimedes’ Cattle Problem is an early, extended and complex case of a poem seeking to interlace arithmetic and aesthetics, but it is not the only case. The focus of analysis in this chapter are the so-called arithmetical poems preserved in Book 14 of the Palatine Anthology (henceforth AP). They similarly challenge their readers to solve the outlined simultaneous equations, and this time, all the arithmetic is solvable. The poems constitute an odd collection: their authorship, date and purpose are all contested. AP 14.116–46 in the modern numbering are a collection of arithmetical poems, which are preceded by a collection of riddles (AP 14.14–47, 52–64, 101–11) and oracles (14.65–100, 112–15, 148–50). The arithmetical poems are attributed to one Metrodorus, whose identity is difficult to ascertain. There seems to be no consensus as to whether Metrodorus should be thought the author or the compiler of the collection. Poems 14.1–4, 6, 7, 11–13 and 48–51 are also arithmetical in nature, and there is evidence that some of them are part of the Metrodoran collection.

This book explores Graeco-Roman poetry’s engagement with and use of numbers. What I mean by this can best be explained by turning to Homer’s self-presentation in the Iliad, where the matter of enumeration intersects with the question of poetic expression.

Chapter 1 analysed Callimachus’ explicit rejection of counting as a form of poetic criticism and traced out the responses to that intervention in subsequent Greek and Latin poetry. Where Callimachus had sought to introduce a poetics that does not require numerical measurement since it focuses instead on the sophia – the sophistication – of the poem, later poets nevertheless found it necessary to address counting forms of criticism alongside an emphasis on their own slender poetry. Against the backdrop of Chapter 1’s diachronic study, this chapter examines in details the output of a single Graeco-Roman poet of the mid-first century ce and his engagement with counting as a form of poetic criticism: Leonides of Alexandria and his isopsephic epigrams.

The second chapter provides an analysis of the Ionian Koinon, the association of the thirteen cities of Ionia, as one of the most direct and explicit channels for expressing Ionian cultural identity. Its festivals and ritual gatherings served both internally and externally as the most important means for making Ionianness visible. By discharging a koinon office, the civic elites of the koinon’s member cities were able to showcase their loyalty to a shared cultural affiliation and at the same time to engage in an inner-Ionian competition for euergetic prestige. This chapter also includes the first prosopographical study of all attested officials of the Ionian Koinon. It is concluded by a comparison with Hadrian’s Panhellenion as another institutionalised confederation which united Greek cities and fostered an ethno-cultural definition of Greekness in the 2nd c. AD.

The first chapter provides a brief historical overview of Ionia as a region, discusses its geographical extent as represented in the works of the authors Strabo and Pliny from the Roman Imperial period, and analyses its place in relation to the superimposed administrative units of the conventus districts and, on a larger scale, within the framework of the province of Asia: both of these transcended the traditional boundaries of Ionia and thus potentially challenged its perceived coherence. The use of city-titles making explicit reference to Ionia is highlighted at the end of the chapter as part of the intercity rivalries consciously imitating references to the larger frame of the province of Asia.