Page "Epigram" Paragraph 1

The Greek tradition of epigrams began as poems inscribed on votive offerings at sanctuariesincluding statues of athletesand on funerary monuments, for example " Go tell it to the Spartans, passersby ...".

These original epigrams did the same job as a short prose text might have done, but in verse.

Epigram became a literary genre in the Hellenistic period, probably developing out of scholarly collections of inscriptional epigrams.