"--David Sider, author of The Epigrams of Philodemos "By recreating, through scholarly accuracy and literary acuity, the original books and Garland of Hellenistic readers, Kathryn Gutzwiller enriches our reading of epigrams. . .

The author uses the Idylls of Theocritus to show us the formative processes at work in the creation of a literary genre - the pastoral - and how the very structure of a genre both shapes and limits judgments about it.