Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Epigrams
These three short epigrams are headed 'of Pancrates' in the Greek Anthology (6.117, 6.356, 7.653). Their author is otherwise unknown; identifying him with other men of that name is conjecture. Two are dedications. In one, a smith offers his hammer, tongs and pincers to Hephaestus. In the other, two Cretan girls, daughters of Cleio, are given to Artemis as temple servants. The third is an epitaph for a man lost at sea, whose father raised him an empty tomb.
Brief as they are, the poems show the Hellenistic epigram's interest in ordinary lives: craftsmen, mothers, sailors and grieving parents. Their restrained, exact phrasing is typical of the genre collected in the Greek Anthology, and they make a good introduction to it.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Anth. Pal. 6.117, 6.356, 7.653; Gow–Page HE Pancrates I–III). 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).