While people of previous ages relied on public performance as their chief means of experiencing poetry, the Hellenistic age developed what one may term a culture of reading. This was the first era in which poets consciously shaped their works with an eye toward publication and reception not just on the civic stage, but in several media - in performance, on inscribed monuments, in scrolls. The essays in Peter Bing’s collection explore how poetry accommodated various audiences, and how these in turn experienced the text in diverse ways. Over the years, Bing’s essays have focused on certain Hellenistic authors and genres - particularly on Callimachus, Posidippus, and on Epigram. His themes, too, have been broadly consistent. Thus, although the essays in
The Marble and the Scroll
span some twenty years, they offer a coherent vision of Hellenistic poetics as a whole. This book contains seminal essays from one of the most prominent scholars of Hellenistic poetry.