Two toasts (AP 12.49 and 51)

At the symposium, adult male citizens of the polis wear garlands woven of flowers to drink and sing of -- among other things -- the 'flowers' of adolescent male beauty; a beauty they themselves have left behind, perhaps not long before, just as the beautiful teenagers they sing of now will in turn move on to become erastai themselves.

Or so at least in the ancient cyclic ideal presented by, above all other genres, epigram. Who can say how messy reatity was, as experienced by boys or men at any particular place and time?

These two poems are by the most famous practitioners of the genre, Meleager and his early Hellenistic forebear, Callimachus.

12.49

Drink the wine neat, you sufferer in love:
Bacchus the giver of forgetfulness
Will put to sleep the pederastic flame
That burns inside you. Lover, drink it neat
And pour yourself a bucketful of wine
To purge your heart of bastard agony.

The god I translate for modern readers as 'father of rivers' in Callimachus' poem below is Achelous. Greek symposiasts invariably drank their wine watered in order to pace the evening and keep behaviour within limits, the proportion of water to wine being a matter for the symposiarch (master of ceremonies) to decide, so this poem too is a declaration that only the hard stuff can dull love's pain.

12.51

Top up, and toast again ‘To Diocles’:
The river-father need not keep account
Of ladles that we hallow in his name.
Father of rivers, lovely is that boy;
Too lovely, even; and if any say
He is unlovely, then let only me
Know and enjoy the loveliness I see.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

The newly translated epigrams in this post continue the theme of the cruel brevity of a boy's anthos, emphasising how pitiful it would be for a lover to fancy such a boy after his moment has passed.

The first (AP 12.40) of these poems is by an unknown author. My version contains two rather large unpackings of single Greek words. The 'old-time cultic statue made of wood' is a xōanon; 'with only the extremities of stone' is its qualifying adjective, akrolithos. There's a perfectly good Wikipedia article about acroliths. Only the exposed 'flesh' parts of an acrolith -- head, hands, feet -- were of marble; they were attached to a fully clothed body in a cheaper material, either wood or a coarser stone.

My little cloak, good sir — leave it alone;
Look at me rather in the way you would
An old-time cultic statue made of wood,
With only the extremities of stone,
Polished and gleaming. If you seek to know
Antiphilus’s loveliness laid bare,
Then, so to speak, you’ll find the rose-bud grow
Upon the spiny briars of his hair. 

Its companion epigram (AP 12.41) is by someone very famous -- Meleager of Gadara, the accomplished erotic epigrammatist who in the first century BC interwove some of his own poems with those of illustrious predecessors to fashion a Garland. This was the first great prototype of the Greek Anthology, a thousand or so years later.

Therōn has been deleted from my list
Of lovely boys. Apollodotus too,
Who in his moment kindled like a flame,
Now a spent torch. I want to love a girl:
Pounding some willing victim’s coarse behind
I’ll leave to swains who shag the goats they mind.