Scribbling and Erasing: How (Not?) to Write an Epitaph in Graeco-Roman Egypt

Among the thousands of Greek literary papyri found in Egypt, a small number of them bear amendments, crossing-outs and corrections filling up the line spacing or the margins that could be ascribed to the author’s own hand. These ‘autograph’ papyri would then represent drafts of works in progress. The third-century fragment PSI 1.17 contains six epigrams, corrected multiple times, which are composed as epitaphs for a man named Euprepios. On the basis of the material analysis of these textual modifications, other epitaphs preserved on papyri as well as literary and epigraphic evidence, this paper aims at offering an insight on the process of creating an epitaph, as much as ancient sources allow.