De recentioris aetatis epigrammate Coi asservato

Abstract

The article examines an unpublished inscription conserved in the Nerantzia Castle of Kos (Greece). It consists of four elegiac couplets that Coan scholar Stamatios K. Pantelidis (Παντελίδης) composed some time before 1879. It was supposed to be located in the facade of the school founded the year indicated in the inscription. Seemingly, after the earthquake which devastated Kos in the year 1933, it was relocated in the warehouse of the Nerantzia Castle in northern Kos along with many other inscriptions. On the one hand, it provides the possibility of knowing how stonegravers work, to what extent Greeks knew their very own language in its ancient form and the way they dealt when it came to use (then and now) unusual forms of the language. On the other hand, the inscription is relevant to the cultural history of Greece in the last years of Ottoman rule and in the years after it, as Kos was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912, date in which it passed under Italian rule until 1947, when the isle was incorporated into the Hellenic Republic. Therefore the purpose is to clarify the historical and real circumstances of the inscription, as well as to analyze the compositional process of this dedicatory epigram from the metrical point of view (it contains many deviations from to the classical precepts), style and classical tradition. The inscription has not been previously studied due to its peculiar characteristics. Indeed, it is an epigram written in modern times but in an archaizing Greek (i. e. roughly respecting the rules of classical grammar), so it is not studied by neohellenists given the ancient character of its language, nor by classicists because it was composed in recent times.