Scope and Contents An Epigram is a brief, clever, and usually memorable statement. Derived from the Greek: "to write on - inscribe"[1], the literary device has been employed for over two millennia. The Greek tradition of epigrams began as poems inscribed on votive offerings at sanctuaries "” including statues of athletes "” and on funerary monuments, for example "Go tell it to the Spartans, passer-by"¦". 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. Though modern epigrams are usually thought of as very short, Greek literary epigram was not always as short as later examples, and the divide between 'epigram' and 'elegy' is sometimes indistinct (they share a characteristic metre, elegiac couplets); all the same, the origin of the genre in inscription exerted a residual pressure to keep things concise. Many of the...