Dear Log,
«Epigrams and epigraphs have an overlooked role in the history of the novel as a literary genre, recording its negotiations with older forms of high literature. Philip Roth was doing something quite traditional when he placed a fragment of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex at the head of his modern story of retribution, The Human Stain. At least he gave it in English. The first volume of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760) had on its title page an epigraph in Greek from Epictetus, without translation. Meaning "Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about things", it exactly fits a mock-learned novel in which characters are tormented by their obsessions.»
