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.

Bristling Nemesis

In pederastic epigram of Strato's kind at least, a boy's flowering (anthos) is all the more precious because it is so fleeting. Sooner rather than later, the fuzzy-cheeked youth will emerge from puberty as a bearded young man. His new and sudden crop of body hair will make him unattractive as a potential beloved (erōmenos). In the natural rhythm of things as envisioned by the Greeks, soon he will be off chasing boys of his own.

Here is an anonymous epigram from the Greek Anthology, AP 12.39, in a new translation that's slightly looser than I might have allowed myself before. My next blog post will give further examples.

Nicander’s loveliness is all burned out,
And all the bloom has flitted from his skin,
As if we’d dreamed it. Of his winning charms
Nothing remains, not even empty name.
It used to be we reckoned him a god.
Do not, you younglings, think so very high,
As if above mere mortals: you will die,
And first there will be hair upon your thigh.

'Flitted...as if we’d dreamed it' unpacks a single Greek verb, ἀποπέτομαι. It means to fly off or fly away, and according to LSJ it is especially used of dreams. When Agamemnon tells his senior advisers about the prophetic dream that visited him in the night promising victory, he describes it as flying away from him when it reached its end: 'ᾤχετ᾽ ἀποπτάμενος'.

Two more young hunks

The wordplay in the first of these epigrams is a matter of an additional letter in the original Greek, rather than a substitution: kuros (the personal name Cyrus) and kurios (lord, master).

The second poem is by the less famous Alcaeus: not Sappho's fellow Lesbian lyricist, but Alcaeus of Messene (third-second century BC). The brief flower of a young man's peak of beauty, his anthos, is likened here to a relay-race: each young athlete carries the flaming torch only for a brief sprint before passing it on to the next runner.

12.28
NUMINIUS OF TARSUS

Jules rules — and I don’t mind the difference
A single letter makes. He is so fine;
I only want to look, not analyse.

12.29
ALCAEUS

Prōtarchus is so lovely — and says no.
Later it will be yes, but all the while
His hour of loveliness is racing on
To pass the love-torch to another boy.

 

 

Two lovely bums

 Two handsome boys with especially lovely bottoms. From Book 12 of the Anthology, of course, so with the usual disclaimers.

12.15
STRATO

Graphicus got a splinter in the bath;
The planking nipped his bum. So what am I,
A living, feeling man, supposed to do,
When lifeless wood is moved to feeling too?

12.37
DIOSCORIDES

Sōsarchus of Amphipolis — that bum:
Murderous Eros played a nasty trick
By moulding it as soft as marrowfat.
He aimed to bother Zeus, because those thighs
Are far more sweet than those of Ganymede.

Smutty and sweet, round two

 Two more from Strato, with the same content warning as before. I'm quite happy with the rhymes. Yes, the first one is about wanking.

12.13
I happened on some lovesick lads one day,
Playing at doctor; they’d a remedy,
And ground it from a natural recipe.
I had them bang to rights; they begged, ‘Don’t say’.
I answered, ‘I’ll keep silent, but my fee
Is that you lay your healing hands on me.’

12.16
Please do not hide our love, Philocrates:
Its guardian spirit needs no further aid
To trample on my heart. But share with me
Some little fraction of a cheerful kiss.
One day you too will beg for favour so,
From boys whose loveliness you seek to know.

One smutty, one sweet

These are both by Strato, and newly translated for the blog. If you are likely to be offended or upset by references to ancient boy-love, I advise you to stop reading now.

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Still here? The first poem used to be read as being about boys' penises at different ages; now it's understood as being about stages of arousal during a sexual encounter. 'Lalou' and 'Coco' are nonsense-words, not found anwhere outside this poem: they could have been in common use among boy-lovers in Strato's time, or he could be making them up. The second poem is sweet.

12.3
Every boy has one, and each finds its place,
Friend Diodorus, in our trifold scheme.
Your second lesson: terminology.
The member yet untouched and in its spring,
You call ‘Lalou’; the one that just began
To puff and swell, is ‘Coco’; and the stage
When it is keen to shudder in the hand,
You call the ‘Lizard’. As for fully-grown —
You know to call it by its proper name.

12.9
You are so fair right now, and fully ripe
For older lovers; even if you wed,
We swear that we shall not abandon you.