Friday 28 May 2021

Bristling Nemesis

In pederastic epigram of Strato's kind at least, a boy's flowering (anthos) is all the more precious because it is so fleeting. Sooner rather than later, the fuzzy-cheeked youth will emerge from puberty as a bearded young man. His new and sudden crop of body hair will make him unattractive as a potential beloved (erōmenos). In the natural rhythm of things as envisioned by the Greeks, soon he will be off chasing boys of his own.

Here is an anonymous epigram from the Greek Anthology, AP 12.39, in a new translation that's slightly looser than I might have allowed myself before. My next blog post will give further examples.

Nicander’s loveliness is all burned out,
And all the bloom has flitted from his skin,
As if we’d dreamed it. Of his winning charms
Nothing remains, not even empty name.
It used to be we reckoned him a god.
Do not, you younglings, think so very high,
As if above mere mortals: you will die,
And first there will be hair upon your thigh.
'Flitted...as if we’d dreamed it' unpacks a single Greek verb, ἀποπέτομαι. It means to fly off or fly away, and according to LSJ it is especially used of dreams. When Agamemnon tells his senior advisers about the prophetic dream that visited him in the night promising victory, he describes it as flying away from him when it reached its end: 'ᾤχετ᾽ ἀποπτάμενος'.


Friday 14 May 2021

Two more young hunks

The wordplay in the first of these epigrams is a matter of an additional letter in the original Greek, rather than a substitution: kuros (the personal name Cyrus) and kurios (lord, master).

The second poem is by the less famous Alcaeus: not Sappho's fellow Lesbian lyricist, but Alcaeus of Messene (third-second century BC). The brief flower of a young man's peak of beauty, his anthos, is likened here to a relay-race: each young athlete carries the flaming torch only for a brief sprint before passing it on to the next runner.

12.28
NUMINIUS OF TARSUS

Jules rules — and I don’t mind the difference

A single letter makes. He is so fine;
I only want to look, not analyse.

12.29
ALCAEUS

Prōtarchus is so lovely — and says no.
Later it will be yes, but all the while
His hour of loveliness is racing on
To pass the love-torch to another boy.