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    Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology
    Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology
    Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology
    Ebook198 pages55 minutes

    Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology

    By Daryl Hine

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    Elegiac lyrics celebrating the love of boys, which the translator terms Puerilities, comprise most of the twelfth book of The Greek Anthology. That book, the so-called Musa Puerilis, is brilliantly translated in this, the first complete verse version in English. It is a delightful eroticopia of short poems by great and lesser-known Greek poets, spanning hundreds of years, from ancient times to the late Christian era.


    The epigrams--wry, wistful, lighthearted, libidinous, and sometimes bawdy--revel in the beauty and fickle affection of boys and young men and in the fleeting joys of older men in loving them. Some, doubtless bandied about in the lax and refined setting of banquets, are translated as limericks. Also included are a few fine and often funny poems about girls and women.


    Fashion changes in morality as well as in poetry. The sort of attachment that inspired these verses was considered perfectly normal and respectable for over a thousand years. Some of the very best Greek poets--including Strato of Sardis, Theocritus, and Meleager of Gadara--are to be found in these pages. The more than two hundred fifty poems range from the lovely to the playful to the ribald, but all are, as an epigram should be, polished and elegant. The Greek originals face the translations, enhancing the volume's charm.



    A friend of Youth, I have no youth in mind,
    For each has beauties, of a different kind.
    --Strat?


    I've had enough to drink; my heart and soul
    As well as tongue are losing self-control.
    The lamp flame bifurcates; I multiply
    The dinner guests by two each time I try.
    Not only shaken up by the wine-waiter,
    I ogle too the boy who pours the water.
    --Strat?


    Venus, denying Cupid is her son,
    Finds in Antiochus a better one.
    This is the boy to be enamored of,
    Boys, a new love superior to Love.
    --Meleager

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 1, 2009
    ISBN9781400824083
    Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology

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      Book preview

      Puerilities - Daryl Hine

      PUERILITIES

      THE LOCKERT LIBRARY OF POETRY IN TRANSLATION

      EDITORIAL ADVISOR: RICHARD HOWARD

      For other titles in the Lockert Library, see p. 125

      PUERILITIES

      Erotic Epigrams of

      The Greek Anthology

      TRANSLATED BY

      DARYL HINE

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton,

      New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,

      Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

      Translations of Strato, I, CC, CCVI, CCVII, and CCXLII; Meleager, XCV and CXXII; Rhianos, XCIII; Diodes, IV; Anonymous, XVII and CXLV; Scythinus, XXII; and Glaucus, XLIV, originally appeared in the Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature and are used here by kind permission of the editor, Byrne R. S. Fone.

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Greek anthology. Book 12. English

      Puerilities : erotic epigrams of The Greek anthology / translated by

      Daryl Hine.

      p. cm. — (Lockert library of poetry in translation)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 0-691-08819-5 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-691-08820-9 (pbk. : alk paper) 1. Erotic poetry, Greek—Translations into English. 2. Epigrams, Greek—Translations into English. I. Hine, Daryl. II. Title. III. Series.

      PA3624.E75 P84 2001

      881′.010803538—dc21         00-066885

      This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond

      The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

      ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper)

      www.pup.princeton.edu

      Printed in the United States of America

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation is supported by

      a bequest from Charles Lacy Lockert (1888–1974)

      For Jerry

      You mavericks, what language should explain

      The derivation of the word makes plain:

      Boy-lovers, Dionysius, love boys—

      You can’t deny it—not great hobblehoys.

      After I referee the Pythian

      Games, you umpire the Olympian:

      The failed contestants I once sent away

      You welcome as competitors today.

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      PUERILITIES

      INDEX TO AUTHORS

      INTRODUCTION

      THE TWELFTH book of The Greek Anthology compiled at the court of Hadrian in the second century A.D. by a poetaster Straton, who like most anthologists included an immodest number of his own poems, is itself a part of a larger collection of short poems dating from the dawn of Greek lyric poetry (Alcaeus) down to its last florescence, which survived two Byzantine recensions to end up in a single manuscript in the library of the Count Palatine in Heidelberg—hence its alternative title, The Palatine Anthology, usually abbreviated to Anth. Pal. This particular, indeed special, collection contained in Book XII subtitled The Musa Paedika or Musa Puerilis, alternately from the Greek word for a child of either sex—and girls are not wholly absent from these pages—or the Latin for boy, consists of 258 epigrams on various aspects of Boy Love or, to recur to the Greek root, paederasty. Some of these poems are by the greatest poets of the Greek language, such as Alcaeus and Callimachus; many are by less well known but nonetheless polished writers, such as Meleager, Asclepiades, Rhianus, and Strato himself; many, these not the least worthy, are anonymous. Their tone varies from the lighthearted and bawdy to the grave and resigned. The overall effect is one of witty wistfulness rather than rampant, reciprocated lust, of longing—what the Greeks called pothos—rather than satisfaction, and also of regret. As happy, let alone domestic, love has occasioned very little poetry at any time, as passion almost always sounds a plaintive note—here at least seldom rising into the desperate wail we hear, for example in Catullus—we might well seek an explanation in the nature of desire itself, on the Platonic model envisaging a forever unattainable, divine object, of which all earthly affection is merely a mirror, however delightful and sometimes delusive. That this undercurrent of spiritual pothos is far from conscious in these poems needs no comment; but it is implicit in the very nature of Love or Eros itself—or, as so often familiarly personified, Himself.

      That the objects of such passion were masculine and for the most part at least comparatively juvenile is an historical fact and, like all facts, an accident. The fact that other later poets in another though not wholly dissimilar Christian, heterosexual tradition, such as notably Dante, Petrarch, Chrétien de Troyes, and Goethe, to mention only a few, found transcendence in the eternal feminine instead is also of but incidental interest. Fashions in passion change, like fads in anything else, and while we are given to thinking our own modes and norms of conduct both universal and solely acceptable, the merest glance at history, literature, and anthropology will show us otherwise, as will a peep behind the façade of respectable behavior. The family unit, however defined, is itself a comparatively recent invention or convention; for whereas the bond of mother and child remains for our kind as for each of us the earliest form of attachment, among adults—and we should never forget that adulthood began much earlier in earlier times—it was the group, the horde, or that most decried yet most prevalent group, the

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