III Epigram from Greece to Rome

Extract

‘Epigrams at Cyzicus’: the enigmatic title of the Anthology's third and shortest Book introduces a sequence of nineteen sequentially numbered epigrams (one of them a broken scrap) purportedly inscribed by or on behalf of two royal brothers in the early second century BCE. Eumenes II and Attalus II were the sons of Attalus I of Pergamum, a small but culturally and politically dynamic Hellenistic kingdom in western Turkey. Just five years after Attalus II died, his nephew left Pergamum to Rome in his will, introducing the Romans to power politics in the Greek East. The Cyzicene epigrams are alleged by the introduction to AP 3 to have been incised on the stulopinakia – whatever they are – in Cyzicus' shrine to Apollonis, the deified mother of Attalus and Eumenes; but the introduction is a confusing text of uncertain provenance, consisting of a single sentence of extraordinarily bad Greek.