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Alexander Sens. Asclepiades of Samos: Epigrams and Fragments. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. pp. cxv, 353. $150.00. ISBN 978-0-19-925319-7.
Asclepiades of Samos has recently attracted special attention thanks to the publication of two fully fledged commentaries that do ample justice to his poetic skill and the enormous influence he exerted on the work of his contemporaries. After I. A. Guichard (Asclepíades de Samos: epigramas y fragmentos. Estudio introductorio, revisión del texto, traducción y comentario, Bern 2004), Sens has now made available to an English-speaking public for the first time a detailed and authoritative commentary of the entire epigrammatic production of this gifted Samian epigrammatist. I am making it clear up front that this is a highly commendable piece of scholarship, which should serve as a model for the kind of commentary scholars should be writing on such demanding Hellenistic poets as Asclepiades.
The first part of this book includes a lengthy (89 pages) introduction that offers a detailed presentation of the multiple contexts pertaining to Asclepiades: his life and works, the rise of the Hellenistic epigram, the relation between Asclepiades and inscribed epigram, the erotic epigram and its generic background,...