Epigram, a word derived from the Greek and literally signifying an 'inscription.' The epigrams of the Greeks were simply inscriptions on tombs, statues, and monuments, written in verse, and marked by great simplicity of style, but having little in common with what is now understood by the name. The founder of the art was Simonides of Ceos, many of whose epigrams were inscribed on the tombs of the heroes who fell in the Persian war. It was among the Romans that the epigram first assumed a satirical character; the greatest Roman masters were Catullus and, in particular, Martial, whose obscenity unhappily was more easily imitated than his genius. In modern times an epigram is understood to be a very short poem, generally from two to eight lines, containing a witty or ingenious thought expressed in pointed phraseology, and in general reserving the essence of the wit to the close, as the serpent is fabled to keep its sting in its tail. It may be the medium for the expression of almost any feeling, provided only it is in form brief, pointed, and exquisite. Epigram, however, fits best the expression of satire—an admirable example is that of Rogers:
Ward has no heart, they say, but I deny it;
He has a heart, and gets his speeches by it.
The Latinists Scaliger, Buchanan, More, Stroza, and John Owen (1560-1622) wrote epigrams, and the form has been kept in an artificial life by Vincent Bourne, Porson, Byron, and Walter Savage Landor. And the excellent Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature (1884), by William Watson, show that the art is not yet quite forgotten. In earlier generations of English literature the epigram was a favourite form, almost every poet in the 16th and 17th centuries having written them. John Heywood 'invented and did' as many as six hundred; other past but forgotten masters are Thomas Freeman, Samuel Sheppard, Thomas Bastard, Thomas Bancroft, and Henry Parrot. A few examples by Herrick, Quarles, and Ben Jonson still survive, while many thousands that cost much labour in the making sleep in secure oblivion. The French excel all other nations in the epigram. Their earliest epigrammatist of any note was Clement Marot (1495-1544); their best are J. B. Rousseau, Lebrun, Voltaire, Marmontel, Piron, and Chénier. The epigrams of German writers are for the most part happily expressed moral proverbs (Sinngedichte), but the Xenien of Schiller and Goethe contain not a few sharp and biting verses of a satirical character. Logau's famous Deutscher Sinngedichte Drey Tausend appeared in 1654; later epigrammatists were Kleist, Opitz, Gleim, Hagedorn, Klopstock, A. W. Schlegel, Lessing, and Herder. A large col- lection of English epigrams was that of Weever (1599). Good epigrams have been written by Cowley, Waller, Dryden, Prior, Swift, Addison, and Young; but the greatest master of the epigrammatic spirit in our literature is Pope.
See Booth, Epigrams, Ancient and Modern (1863); Dodd, Epigrammatists of Medieval and Modern Times (2d ed. 1875); Adams, Book of Epigrams (1879); Aubrey Stewart, English Epigrams and Epitaphs (1897).