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Abstract This book develops a case study of a single ancient Greek verse genre, epigram, in its modern reception from 1805 to 1929. Previously exclusive to an educated elite for whom it served time-honoured functions in pedagogy and social exchange, epigram in the nineteenth century became an important site of contestation between mainstream and dissident Hellenisms in the public sphere. Its principal literary repository, the Greek Anthology, was hailed as a unique social document which gave unmediated access to ancient private lives. Picking and choosing from its thousands of poems let translators and literary historians string together any story they wanted about the Greek 'Genius', the national and racial spirit which was widely felt to live again through modern British character and achievement; so these stories were potentially about 'us', or about who 'we' might become in future. One book of the Anthology, however, stuck out as alien: the twelfth, dedicated to the love of men for handsome youths. Subcultural appropriations of the Anthology thus became an important tool in forging an honourable genealogy for male homosexual desire. In turn, these appropriations provoked a backlash by conservative critics, the after-effects of whose rhetoric of containment is still with us in epigram studies today. By tracking this one 'minor' genre through a century and more of (mis)representation, Greek Epigram in Reception therefore throws new light on the complex processes by which ancient literary works are received in translation, selection, and exegesis, and on how these processes forever change the texts on which they operate.
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