This study focuses on the reception of tragedy and the tragic in Hellenistic poetry. It illustrates how classical tragedy and the tragic idea were incorporated in the poems of Callimachus and Theocritus, Apollonius Argonautica, the iambic Alexandra and late Hellenistic poetry. It demonstrates that the tragic was not doomed to failure in the postclassical world but lived on through the works of the great Alexandrian poets and their followers.

This collective volume includes twenty-one contributions by an international team of scholars addressing a neglected topic of classical scholarship, namely dialect, diction, and style in literary and inscribed epigram. By combining traditional methods with modern viewpoints, the authors explore the interplay between rhetoric, design, and thematics in Greek epigram as a key to its fuller understanding as an art form.