Byzantine book epigrams (DBBE)

A book epigram is a short verse a Byzantine scribe or patron added to a manuscript -- praising the book, naming its owner, or asking readers to remember the person who paid for it. The Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams catalogues these systematically across thousands of surviving Greek manuscripts, recording which verses were copied as fixed formulas and which were composed fresh for a particular book.

Because the database distinguishes formulaic verses from custom-composed ones and records exactly which manuscripts carry which, it lets conjectures test how personalization and formula coexist. Epigrams are born famous asks whether an epigram's fame at the time of composition predicts its odds of being copied again elsewhere, and The universality class of survival treats survival itself as following the same general mathematical shape across very different kinds of medieval object. Stock verses for sacred stock and Bespoke verses for philosophers both test whether an epigram's formulaic-versus-bespoke status tracks who it was written for -- a stock verse for a sacred book, a custom one for a named philosopher.