Love's victim: Meleager

Two by Meleager, the great erotic poet of the late Hellenistic age. The lovestruck erastēs who pines and sickens is a trope of pederastic epigram. 

'The urn' (kalpis) of the first poem is the cinerary urn that will hold the poet's ashes, but the word originally meant a jug or indeed the hudria from which water was poured at the symposium to dilute the wine; Meleager is surely playing on that double sense. The 'pirate Eros' of the second poem is biaios in the Greek, which means nothing more specific than violent or forceful, but the accompanying verb, helkō, means to drag or tow; so I allowed myself some liberties.

12.74
MELEAGER

If anything should happen to me, friend —
Because, you see, the better part of me
Was tossed into the fire of pretty boys
And lies there as an ember in the glow —
Then, Cleobulus, I beseech of you,
Make the urn tipsy with unwatered wine
Before you bury it, and add the line,
‘A gift from Eros to the world below.’

12.84
THE SAME

My friends, I’m sending out an SOS:
No sooner do I step upon the shore,
My maiden voyage only just complete,
Than pirate Eros takes me under tow,
Seeing as how he brandishes his torch
And turns my head to see a lovely boy
And want him badly. Step by step I go,
Each in his footstep, and in empty air
I plunder sweetened kisses from the lips
Of a sweet phantom cast in fantasy.
Have I escaped the unrelenting sea
Only to reach dry land and so succumb
Under a flood less merciful by far,
The surge and billow of the Cyprian?