PHOENIX – What does Twitter, one of today’s biggest social media sites, have to do with ancient Greek poetry that was written more than 2,000 years ago?

The connections are broader than one might think, according to Mike Tueller, an associate professor of Greek in Arizona State University’s School of International Letters and Cultures, as Arizona State University informs.

Tueller will be exploring those connections between Twitter and short Greek poems called epigrams in his talk, “The Original Tweets: Tiny Poems of the Ancient Greeks” at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 16 on ASU’s Downtown Phoenix campus.

“Twitter is a genre that is constrained by technology, very similar to epigrams,” Tueller said. “Some people look at Twitter and think, ‘How can you make any kind of social commentary in such a small space?’”

But “there’s always been brief genres and while you can’t do everything, you can do some things,” he said.

Tueller doesn’t make his jokes on Twitter, but he is a fan of the application. He also finds himself fascinated at how certain things go viral, finding that the fame that comes from that is similar to what writers sought back in the 10th century.

“What makes a tweet good? There are a number of different ways to do it, whether it’s referring to something bigger or making a joke,” Tueller said. “Epigrams are often that way too.”

The earliest Greek epigrams were inscribed on monuments or offerings at sanctuaries. And just as comedians work today to create “memes,” riffing on top of one another to try and make better jokes, writers of these epigrams did the same thing as they attempted to make new and better meanings.

“They had to reinforce their cultural narrative,” Tueller said. “They wanted to prove how smart they were, how complex their literature was, and how amazing Greeks were.”

Tueller will spend roughly half of Thursday’s lecture talking about those epigrams and what made them special, while taking the rest of the time to explore the medium of Twitter and the connections between the two.