Meleager's university pashes

'The poems written by Meleager to his youthful companions were composed at Gadara rather than at Tyre. They are the records of a series of passionate friendships, and though in our MSS. they form part of Strato's "Musa Puerilis", they have nothing in common with the coarse animalism of that collection...

'His university studies at Gadara ended, Meleager bade farewell to his youthful comrades and to his books, and embarked upon a life of pleasure at Tyre.' - from Wright's Introduction (n.p.).

To present the pederastic epigrams of Meleager as the crushes of a teenager on his agemates is a bold ambition, though one with precedent. Wright's segmentation of the poet's career is cued up by some remarks on attribution that repay our careful attention:

'I have now attempted, I think for the first time, to translate into English all the genuine epigrams. Some few pieces commonly attributed to Meleager I discard, for the attributions of the Palatine MS. are notoriously unreliable, and these particular poems have already aroused the suspicion of scholars. Some few others doubtfully attributed to him I accept; so that the final total, one-hundred and thirty-one, corresponds to that which is generally received.'

Fixed it:

I've left out some poems -- and I'm not telling you how many they are, still less what they were about -- because the experts agree they are probably not his. You don't need to know which experts; you can take my word for it. [sidenote: no, we can not.] And I've added in an equal number of poems that the experts agree are also probably not his, because haven't we all had enough of experts? Anyway, I started with the right number and I've ended up with the same after all my fiddling about, so everything worked out fine in the end.

One would need to be a pedant of the feeblest kind to go through Wright's Complete Meleager and work out exactly which poems he has cut from Book 12. When I did so, I found the following omissions: AP 12.85, 94, 95, and 133. Why? Plainly because Meleager presents himself explicitly in these four poems as a symposiast, and therefore a grown man, who pursues sex with pubescent males. He is not a teenager and he wants to do a lot more than hold hands and maybe one day kiss. These four poems completely give the lie to the comforting narrative of phases that Wright inherited from Bland.

The rest he arranges into a biographical story that fits his predetermined scheme. Undergraduate-Meleager passes through a series of crushes, his head turned by each exciting new varsity arrival, many of them the subject of his infatuation for just one poem. Towards the end of his studies he becomes a little less flighty -- he dallies with Heraclitus, Theron, and last and most seriously, Myiscus.

But at last he must put aside childish things and become a grown-up. My next post will look at the epigram in which Wright has him do so, with a little rewriting.