A couple of mornings ago I awoke from an unusually vivid dream. In it, I had been weeping over a Greek epigram, one of the selection that I had included in my forthcoming Epigrams from the Greek Anthology for the World's Classics.
The epigram packed a lot into its two lines, which knowing me will have become three lines in translation. On the surface, its form was straightforward: the narrator simply remarked upon how attractive had been the jewellery made by his son to the deities of the sea. Whether he was the young craftsman's father by blood or adoption, or they were patron and client (a relationship often articulated through the language of senior and junior generations in surviving ancient letters), the bond between them had clearly been close, and the feeling of loss profound. For this was a poem of loss, from the Anthology's large collection of epitaphs. By inescapable implication, the sea-gods' and -goddesses' desire to possess the younger man's craft had been made manifest in his loss at sea, drowned in shipwreck.
I have used past tenses to describe the epigram because it is lost, gone for good. It was there in my dream, but it is most certainly not in my translated selection. I doubt that any such poem is to be found in the Anthology; but if it should somehow be there, I am certain I have never read it.
It feels plausible, though; and for however long I dreamed of it two nights back, it felt very real indeed: real enough to weep at.
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