Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Epigrams
Epigrams are a small group of poems by Julia Balbilla, a noblewoman at the court of the emperor Hadrian and descendant of the royal house of Commagene. In November 130 she visited the Colossi of Memnon at Thebes in Egypt with Hadrian and the empress Sabina, and her poems, written in the Aeolic dialect of Sappho, were carved on the left leg and foot of the statue, which was famed for sounding at dawn.
The epigrams are rare poems by a named woman writer of the Roman period and still survive on the statue itself. They record the imperial visit, including a morning when Memnon was silent, and reflect the learned literary revival of Hadrian's age and its fondness for archaic Greek poetry.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca 988–992 (= CIG 4725–4731)). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).