directness of the epigram.

The notorious difficulty of giving any satisfactory definition of
poetry is almost equalled by the difficulty of defining with precision
any one of its kinds; and the epigram in Greek, while it always
remained conditioned by being in its essence and origin an
inscriptional poem, took in the later periods so wide a range of
subject and treatment that it can perhaps only be limited by certain
abstract conventions of length and metre. Sometimes it becomes in all
but metrical form a lyric; sometimes it hardly rises beyond the
versified statement of a fact or an idea; sometimes it is barely
distinguishable from a snatch of pastoral. The shorter pieces of the
elegiac poets might very often well be classed as epigrams but for the
uncertainty, due to the form in which their text has come down to us,
whether they are not in all cases, as they undoubtedly are in some,
portions of longer poems. Many couplets and quatrains of Theognis fall
under this head; and an excellent instance on a larger scale is the
fragment of fourteen lines by Simonides of Amorgos,[7] which is the
exact type on which many of the later epigrams of life are moulded. In
such cases /respice auctoris animum/ is a safe rule; what was not
written as an epigram is not an epigram. Yet it has seemed worth while
to illustrate this rule by its exceptions; and there will be found in
this collection fragments of Mimnermus and Theognis[8] which in
everything but the actual circumstance of their origin satisfy any
requirement which can be made. In the Palatine Anthology itself,
indeed, there are a few instances[9] where this very thing is done. As
a rule, however, these short passages belong to the class of {gromai}
or moral sentences, which, even when expressed in elegiac verse, is
sufficiently distinct from the true epigram. One instance will
suffice. In the Anthology there occurs this couplet:[10]