SEVENTEEN
ANCIENT POEMS
Translated
from Greek and Latin by Thomas McEvilley
Meleager of Gadara
Raising
the Alarm
Meleager Commiserates with
His Soul
Meleager Addresses His
Servant Dorkas
Meleager Speaks to a Honey
Bee
Instructions for Meleager’s Burial
Meleager Reproaches the
Dawn
Meleager Reproaches the
Dawn Again
An Address to the Bedside Lamp
Meleager Writes a Poem for
the Police
Meleager Puzzled
Philodemus of Alexandria
Philodemus Reforms
Philodemus Reforms Again
Anakreontea
Invocation
Night Vision
Anacreon Speaks
to the Ladies
Anacreon’s Grave
Horace
Strategy
for Living
Bibliographical Note
Of these seventeen poems sixteen are in ancient Greek and were found in the collection called the Greek Anthology. Twelve of these sixteen were brief elegies of the type later called epigrams. Ten of these twelve are by Meleager of Gadara, who was Syrian by birth but Greek by education. His collection called the Garland (about 90 BC) established the style and spirit of the earliest anthologies of poems. The other two “epigrams” are by Philodemus, also of Gadara, who was an Epicurean philosopher of the circle of Calpurnius Piso in Herculaneum. The four selections from the Anacreontea are metrically different but also from the Greek Anthology. The seventeenth is the one Latin Poem, by Horace. All seventeen, with the possible exception of the undated Anacreontea, are from the first century BC. All are untitled in the original.
MELEAGER
1.
Help! He is gone.
That wild boy, Love, has escaped!
Just
now, as day was breaking, he flew from his bed and was gone.
Description?
Sweetly tearful, talks forever, swift, irreverent,
Slyly
laughing, wings on his back, and carries a quiver.
His last name? I don’t know, for his father and mother,
Whoever
they are, in earth or heaven, won’t admit it.
Everyone
hates him, you see. Take care, take care,
Or
even now he’ll be weaving new snares for your heart.
But
hush—look there, turn slowly. You don’t deceive me, boy,
Drawing
your bow so softly where you hide in Zenophile’s eyes.
(AP V.177)
2.
Didn’t I tell you,
oh soul, “Look out, you’ll be caught,
You silly thing,
if you flutter so near her net?”
Didn’t I warn you?
And
now the trap is sprung.
Why struggle in
vain?
Love
has tied your little wings,
Sprinkled you with
cheap perfume, set you fainting in the fire
And given you, in
your thirst, hot tears to drink.
(AP XII.132)
3.
That’s the
message, Dorkas, and when you’ve told it to her
Then tell it to
her again, and then again, now hurry.
But wait a minute;
hold on there; slowly, my Dorkas, slowly.
Why are you
rushing off before you’ve heard all your instructions?
Say also that
I—but no. It’s more manly to be silent.
Don’t tell her a
goddamn thing. Say only that I--. Tell it all!
All of it Dorkas, all of it! But, Dorkas,
why did I send you,
When, look, I have
followed after you, all the way to her door?
(AP V.182)
4.
Do
you leave the flowers of spring,
The
lilies and the rest,
And
plant your little sting
In Heliodora’s breast
To
show that in love’s wound,
So
deep and terrible,
A sweetness may be found
That
makes life bearable?
Oh,
please, your news is wasted,
I
knew it long ago.
Do
you think I have not tasted
Where
you, drunkard, linger so?
(AP V.163)
5.
If anything
happens to me,
Kleoboulos my friend,
(For I am not
safe—
I
lie like a curling vine
Flung in the fire
of girls)
before you send
My ashes under
earth
pour in strong wine,
Then on the
drunken urn write,
“Hades,
know
Love sends this
gift to death”—
And
bury me and go.
(AP V.172)
6.
Dawn hateful to
lovers, why do you rise so quickly
Beside my bed when
I lie with delicious Demo?
Can’t you turn
round, run back and be night again,
And stop that
sweet smiling that pours out poison light?
Once before you
did that, when Zeus was enjoying Alcmena.
Oh, learned at
running backward! You can’t say you don’t know how. .
.
(AP V.172)
7.
Dawn hateful to
lovers, why do you roll so slowly
Around the sad
world when under another man’s blanket
Demo lies and
sheds her god-like heat?
When it was my
turn to hold her slender body in my arms
You couldn’t wait
to hurl your disgusting light in my eyes.
(AP V.173)
8.
Oh Night, and you, kind lamp beside
his bed,
No one else was
near so you
Were
witness to our vows,
He that he’d love
me,
I, that I’d never
leave him,
Oh, you remember.
But now he says
that vows flow away on the river,
Stay no longer
than stay the breaking waves.
And you, oh lamp,
Now you see him lying
In someone else’s embrace.
(AP V.8)
9.
I pray you, Eros, in the name of my muse I pray you,
Oh let me sleep and forget
for a while this lust for Heliodora.
My god, I pray by your bow which doesn’t know
how to shoot
At anyone else but day and night sinks shafts of screams in me!
Alright, no more prayers, you sonofabitch, you won’t get away with it.
With my last strength I write this poem for the police—
It was love—
Love killed me.
(AP V.215)
10.
What
I cannot see is how,
From
the green wave rising,
Out
of water, Oh Aphrodite,
You
bred a flame.
(AP V.176.5-6)
PHILODEMUS
I
want no more garlands of white violets, no more lyre playing,
No
more wine with cocaine in it, no more Syrian incense burning on the night-table,
No
more all night parties that end with a thirsty whore in my bed—
No
more! I hate these things, they are all driving me mad!
But—give me garlands of narcissus
flowers, and let me play the flute,
Perfume me with saffron, give me wine with
amphetamines and hashish,
And mate
me, yes, mate me with a virrrgin.
(AP XI.34)
Already
more than half the pages have been torn out of the little book of my life;
Look,
girl, already white hairs are sprinkled on my head,
announcing that the age of wisdom is drawing
near.
But
still all I care about is laughing and drinking and the pleasures of the night;
Still,
in my unsatisfied heart, a fire is burning.
Oh,
Muses, my guides, write an end to it: Say, This girl, this one here,
She is the end of your madness.
(AP XI.41)
ANACREONTEA
Bring
me Homer’s lyre, yes, bring it,
But
leave that string of blood out
Bring
a cup of versing rules
Oh
and mix some metres in it
I
will sing, then I’ll be dancing
Not
a drop of sense left in me
I
will dance to horn and zither
Crying
out the cries that wine makes
Bring
me Homer’s lyre, yes, bring it
Oh
but take that string of blood out
•
In
a dream
Anacreon,
the singer of Teos,
Looked
at me and laughingly addressed me.
And
I ran up to him
And
embraced him and kissed him.
He
was an old man, but beautiful,
Beautiful and fond of wine.
His
lips smelled of grapes.
Though
he was already old and quaking
Eros
led him by the hand.
As
he passed by he took the wreath from his head
And
gave it to me.
And
I stupidly took it
And
bound it around my forehead
And
ever since
I
have been mad with the sting of love.
•
Anacreon,
The ladies say,
You really shouldn’t
Act that way;
Look in the mirror,
Your head is bald,
Your cheek is pale,
You’re getting old.
Well, ladies, I say,
I don’t know if my hair
Is thick or thin
And I don’t care
But the closer to death
I drift each day
The louder must I
Sing and play.
•
Here
lies Anacreon,
An
old man, a wine bibber,
And a lover of boys. His
Harp
still sounds in silent
Acheron
as he sings
Of the boys he left behind,
Megasthenes, who was so
Graceful,
and that passionate
Thracian, Smerdies, and
Bathyllos and Euripile.
The
vine tendrils mingle with
His
carven beard, and the white
Marble
smells of wine and myrrh.
HORACE
Leuconoe, why try to know
The
future, which cannot be known?
Or
what the Assyrian numbers say
Of your fate and my own?
Put
it away, don’t waste your time,
Winter
will come on
And
break the lower sea on the rocks
While
we drink summer’s wine.
See,
in the white of the winter air
The
day hangs like a rose.
It
droops down to the reaching hand
Take
it before it goes.
(Odes I.11)