Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Epigram
Epigram is a single short poem in elegiac couplets on Lysippus' bronze statue of Alexander the Great, preserved in the Planudean Anthology. Its manuscript heading names "Archelaus, or according to others Asclepiades", so the author is uncertain, and identifying this Archelaus with the Hellenistic writer on marvels from Chersonesus is only a conjecture. The poem praises the sculptor for capturing Alexander's daring and his whole form, and imagines the bronze king looking up to Zeus and speaking.
Lysippus was Alexander's favoured sculptor, and this epigram is one of the best-known ancient responses to his portraits. Its closing line, in which Alexander claims the earth and leaves Olympus to Zeus, neatly captures the image of the conqueror that his portraits projected, and it shows the Hellenistic epigram's fondness for artworks that seem about to speak.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Anth. Plan. (AP 16) 120; Gow-Page HE). 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). The lemma of Anth. Plan. 120 reads 'Archelaus, or according to others Asclepiades', and equating this Archelaus with the paradoxographer of Chersonesus is only a conjecture.