My thesis explores the dialect of Hellenistic Inscribed Epigrams from Doric-speaking areas, a corpus not yet analysed in its entirety. The aim of the research is twofold: to fill a gap in the scholarship, through a systematic and comprehensive description of the dialectal features from the collected inscriptions; to understand the diachronic change of the dialect of inscribed epigrams from the Archaic/Classical age to the Hellenistic age, and the role played by the local dialects and the newly spread Koine, as well as the new-born genre of literary epigrams. Thus, I argue that it is possible to disentangle local and supra-local factors that shape dialectal choices in epigrams, and I reconsider the importance of inscribed Hellenistic epigrams and their local context in the making of the genre.

In the introduction, I give an overview of the debate surrounding the dialectal mixture attested in inscribed and literary epigrams, outlining the selected corpus and methodological framework. In the first chapter, I provide a description of dialectal features and their frequency by linguistic level and morphemes, to be used as a reference tool throughout the thesis. I then reject the idea of previous scholarship that epigrams have a ‘dialectal base’, as well as the formal classification of features by dialectal categories. Rather, I propose a new method that accounts for the dialectal features based on their distribution and usage in epigrams, and I argue that these factors can be assessed only through the linguistic and cultural context of inscriptions. The following three chapters unfold this research hypothesis by providing a contextual analysis of epigrams from the Peloponnese, North-West Greece, and the Aegean Islands. In each chapter, the dialect of epigrams is compared with features attested in contemporary prose inscriptions and in pre-Hellenistic epigrams from each area: I thus reconsider the importance of the spoken varieties and the local context, so far believed having little or no impact on the epigrammatic dialect of the Hellenistic age. In the chapter dedicated to North-West Greece, I further offer a new understanding of the diachrony of the epigrammatic genre by comparing the results with the literary epigrams composed by Damagetus and Posidippus, and therefore by considering the interaction between the inscribed and literary production. I conclude with a brief discussion of the methodology of the study and its potential implementation across sources exhibiting dialectal mixture.