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"This is an anthology of private funerary poems in Greek from the archaic period until later antiquity. The vast majority of these poems were inscribed on tombs or grave stelai and served to identify, celebrate and mourn the dead. It is not in fact very difficult to distinguish such 'funerary' poems from other types of inscription, even if there are important overlaps in style and subject between, say, some honorific and some epitaphic verse-inscriptions; what can be much more difficult, however, is to distinguish 'public' from 'private' inscriptions, and indeed to decide what, if anything, is at stake in the distinction and how that distinction changed over time. Our earliest verse epitaphs seem to be 'private', in the sense that, as far as we can tell, they were designed and erected by the family of the deceased. For the fifth century, however, our evidence is predominantly Attic, and, from the first three-quarters of the century in particular, we have very few clearly 'private' such inscriptions, as opposed to those either sponsored or displayed (or both) by public authorities; this was the age of public burials and public commemorations in polyandry or 'multiple tombs', which (quite literally) embodied the spirit of public service demanded of male citizens. 'Private' poems too, of course, reflected the ideology of the city in which they were displayed, and we must not assume that a 'public-private' distinction mapped exactly on to some ancient equivalent of a modern 'official-unofficial' one. 'Private' inscriptions, for example, might need 'public' blessing to be erected in a particularly prominent place or even to use a particular language of praise."--
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