Such a publication in Russian is offered for the first time. It includes such ancient Greek elegies that have been preserved in full or in fragments, starting from the 7th century BC and ending with the 1st century AD. Common origin, common poetics and common metric made it possible to combine epigrammatic poems in the collection along with elegies, which, not being the original real inscriptions, that is, initiations or epitaphs, have been preserved in the book tradition and are very close to elegies. Many texts have never been translated into Russian. Although individual excerpts from the elegies of Theognides were known in translations earlier (A. Piotrovsky, V. Veresaev), in the collection the whole of Theognides was translated completely anew, including the second book. Thus, the reader is given the opportunity to create a holistic opinion of these curious elegies and their author.