By shifting focus away from a particular poet, collection, and the epigrammatic production of a specific historical period, this study explores diachronically erotic epigram from various interpretative angles, treating the surviving material as an organic whole. It focuses on narrative techniques employed by the epigrammatists (the flexible use of 'concrete images' and of a wide range of metaphors, the amalgamation of different portrayals of Eros in the same epigram, etc.)