Strato's Boyish Muse

 My next few posts will feature freshly done translations from the twelfth book of the Anthology, which comes down to us under the heading STRATŌNOS MOUSA PAIDIKĒ, Strato's Boyish Muse.

That title must originally have attached to a book written and arranged by Strato himself, containing his own epigrams and nobody else's. Cephalas used that book as a dumping-ground for whatever other homoerotic epigrams came his way -- notably those of Meleager, whose Garland probably mingled expressions of gay and straight desire interchangeably. I reckon we can probably still pretty much read Strato's Boyish Muse simply by going through Book 12 and ignoring all the ones that aren't by him.

Book 12 has been excellently translated by Daryl Hine under the title Puerilities (2001 -- read a review of it here) and there are a couple of older, small-press selections about which I might blog some time. Paton's old Loeb put the muckier bits into Latin, just as it did for the more explicit poems of the heterosexual Book 5.

Here is Strato's opening poem, from my World's Classics translation, taking the opening statement of Aratus' Phaenomena (the Roman world's favourite didactic epic) as a pretext for swearing off girls, divine and mortal alike:

‘Let us begin from Zeus’, Aratus said;
Muses, I shall not bother you today.
If I love boys and keep their company,
What is it to the maids of Helicon?

TRIGGER WARNING. This material won't be to every reader's taste. If translations and discussion of pederastic epigrams are likely to offend or upset you, please skip the next few blog posts.