Hellenistic epigrammatists’ innovations upon standard generic topoi, their creative employment of the constructive principles of genre, and their uses of novel sub-genres have already been highlighted in chapters where I focused attention equally or more intensely on other epigrammatic contexts.

This chapter sets out specifically to explore certain generic contexts within which Hellenistic poets worked. Its starting-point is dialogue, which is rarely present in early inscribed epigrams, but which by the third century BC had become reasonably frequent in epigraphic epitymbia and anathematika. As will be shown, professional poets of the Hellenistic age went on to employ more complex dialogue in their epitymbic and anathematic epigrams, and they introduced dialogue of equal complexity into other types of epigram (e.g. the erotic) with no epigraphic past. Both implicit dialogue, when a respondent's words are not heard by the reader but influence the epigram's speaker, and explicit dialogue are found in Hellenistic epigrams.

Implicit dialogue

Implicit dialogue is rare, and its presence in specific instances may even be open to doubt. Thus the proposal that in Callimachus AP 12.71 = 12 HE a lover exhibits ‘symptoms of love’ and then, unheard by the reader, confesses the identity of his beloved has been disputed (see above pp.371–3). A clearer case of an addressee who implicitly responds comes in Asclepiades AP 5.181 = 25 HE. In this epistaltikon/mandata the master's instructions to his slave are by implication interrupted by the slave's protests that he has no funds and is not to blame; but the slave's responses appear only in his master's indignant, sceptical repetitions of them (2–3, 5, 8?). A similar but more fleeting scenario is found in Argentarius APl. 241.1 = 37.1 GPh., a priapeum in which the god warns a passer-by about the typical indecent consequence of stealing figs under his protection. The epigram begins ὥριμος, οἶδα καὶαὐτός, ὁδοιπόρε, which Page translated as “It is ripe, I know it as well as you, my travellerfriend”. Some scholars have regarded ὥριμος as spoken by the passer-by, which would give the epigram explicit dialogue form.