The Oxford Classical Dictionary © Oxford University Press 1996, 2000
Epigram — Greek — Archaic. An epigram was originally nothing more than an inscription on an object or monument to say whose it is or who made it, who dedicated it to which god, or who is buried beneath it. The earliest known are in hexameters ..., but by c.500 they were predominantly in what was to be the classic metre of epigram, the elegiac couplet. The earliest consist largely of formulae 'this is tomb (of so-and-so), stand and take pity … (so-and-so) set up (this) for the deceased … (so-and-so) dedicated me') plus the appropriate proper names in stereotyped epicizing phraseology.
— Classical. Epigrams written for monuments are normally anonymous; the earliest signed by the author date from c.350. The first poet credited with writing epigrams is Simonides... (большинство эпиграмм классического периода считаются подложными)
— Hellenistic. With the 3rd cent. we find an enormous expansion of non-inscriptional epigram... Fictitious dedications were a neat way to treat the lives of humble folk rather than kings and generals, through the different objects vowed by rustics, hunters, and fishermen—or even hetairai. Anyte of Tegea wrote on women and children and pastoral themes, epitaphs on animals rather than humans. Leonidas of Tarentum was the most influential writer of this school, influential too in establishing an ornate style and dithyrambic vocabulary as its medium. Asclepiades and Callimachus wrote about wine, women, boys, and song, renewing the themes of Classical sympotic elegy and lyric, though they were selective in the motifs they treated, investing them with that combination of allusiveness, conciseness, and wit that were ever after to be the hallmarks of the genre. The simple exchange between passer-by and tomb we find in Classical epitaphs is expanded into witty dialogue under the influence of mime. The epitaph is developed into poems on those long as well as recently dead, and epigrams on writers are especially common. The dedication also evolved into the ekphrasis on a work of art, another form with a long future...
Early Hellenistic epigrams were often quite long and in metres other than elegiacs. Most of the major poets published books of EPIGRAMMATA. ... It has sometimes been argued that epigrams were now 'book-poetry', but they continued to be written for their original function as well as for the symposium. Callimachus ... wrote a number of epigrams for Alexandrian monuments...
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