(Removes her shoe and holds it up for all to see.)
What! Did an ox
Make you this shoe, imitating its hoof?
(Fits on one of his shoes.)
If my knife had followed your foot’s outline,
Could the fit of this shoe have been nicer?
By my household altar, it’s perfect!
(To another woman, who is already leaving.)
You at the door snickering like a horse
At me and my wares, seven darics now,
And this pair is all yours, what do you say?
(The women are all gathering themselves to leave, having seen every shoe in the place.)
Well, you need sandals for around the house.
Or bedroom slippers. So just send a slave.
(On a hopeful note.)
Remember, Metro, red shoes by the ninth,
In good time for the wedding, keep in mind.
(Proverbially.)
Winter clothes must be made in summer heat.
(Looks heavenward in disgust.)
VIII. The Dream
[A COMIC POET]
(To his Servants.)
Get up, Psylla! Get up, girl. If you snooze
The whole day away, who’s to slop the pig?
She’s out there famished, grunting for breakfast.
Are you waiting for the sun to come up!
A nine-year night would be too short for you!
You sleep so hard it makes you tired. Get up!
Light the lamps. Put the pig out to pasture.
She’s driving me crazy. Grumble and scratch!
(Pokes the slave Psylla with a stick.)
There! Next time I’ll dent your lazy head.
Megallis! You in the Latmian cave?
You’re everlastingly tired, O yes.
But certainly not tired from carding wool.
I need a strand now for a sacrifice
And there’s not a wisp anywhere about.
Get up, you rascal!
(To a slave already up and about.)
Anna, a moment
With you, please. You are my one sane servant.
Come listen to a dream I had last night.
I was dragging a goat down a gully,
A fine goat with big horns and a long beard,
As they do dancing to Dionysos
And then some dived headfirst into the dust,
And rolled, and some flopped wildly on their backs.
All this was both comic and pitiful,
[Ten lines unreadable.]
Puffing and blowing, stamping with his foot.
Out of my sight, or, old man that I am,
I will cripple you with my walking stick!
I cried out: O all you people, I die
For my country if this old man hits me.
I stand well with this boy, as he will say,
Just as the goatherds rent and ate the goat,
So do the critics savage my poems.
They kick me about before the Muses.
Here’s what I think it means. I take first prize
In balancing best on the greased wineskin.
Of all those trying to keep their footing
I alone kept from falling, I alone
Aroused the old man’s envy, old Hipponax.
By the Muses! The iambic Muses!
I shall take the prize for comic poems,
Master of satire in all Ionia.
IX. The Breakfast
WOMAN
Let’s all sit. And where now is the baby?
Maia, hand him here. Eveteira, too.
(The rest is lost.)
X. Molpinos
(Speaker unknown.)
You’ve had, Gryllos, sixty rounds of the sun.
Die now, Gryllos, and mingle with the dust.
The last turns of the track are blindly run.
Go. The light is dying, as all light must.
(The rest is lost.)
XI. The Working Girls
(Speaker unknown.)
Hugging as tight as a limpet its rock.
(The rest is lost.)
(Speaker unknown.)
A family with trouble is hard
To find. For every problem you solve,
There’s another ready to take its place.
(The rest is lost.)
XIII. [The Little Boy]
(Speaker unknown.)
Playing blind man’s bluff, banging the cookpot,
Flying a junebug tethered by a thread,
He destroyed his grandpa’s afternoon nap.
(The rest is lost.)
Notes
ARCHILOCHOS
Translated from the text of Archilochos established by François Lasserre, published in 1958 by the Association Guillaume Budé, Archiloque, Fragments, texte établi par François Lasserre, traduit et commenté par André Bonnard (Paris), except for 18, which is the recently discovered Cologne Papyrus, and 259, which is my conjectural reading of a newly edited fragment in Sir Denys Page’s Supplementum Lyrics Graecis (Oxford, 1974). Since I first read Archilochos in J.M. Edmonds’s Elegy and Iambus, Vol. II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931; reprinted 1954), the scholar will find traces of that edition in my translation, and twice I have preferred Edmonds’s reading to Lasserre’s.
1. Possibly a complete epigram.
4. The island is Thasos, where Archilochos’s father founded a settlement.
6. A badly mangled fragment, restored by conjecture.
8. Three discrete fragments joined this way on the evidence of an underground temple to Cotytto frequented by homosexuals. Archilochos’s acid remarks about hair styles turn up in several other fragments.
13. Long hair was a hazard in close fighting, as the enemy could grab it if matters came to that.
14. For the opulence of Gyges, see Herodotus.
16. Death as a gift: a prophylactic use of language common in Archilochos.
18. S 478 Archilochus P. Colon. 7511 saec. ii p. C. prim. ed. R. Merkelbach and M. L. West, ZPE 1974] Composed around 650 B.C., discovered by Anton Fackelmann on papyrus used for mummy wrapping. There have been many essays on this new fragment (or poem entire), and much pedantic argument as to what’s going on in it. I think it is a comic ode about a biological jumping the gun that transposes an erotically comic poem into a wholly comic one. Its humor is still native to barracks. See Peter Green, The Times Literary Supplement, 14 March 1975, p. 272, and H. D. Rankin, Archilochus of Paros (Noyes Classical Studies, 1977), pp. 57–73, and my “Archilochos: Fireworks on the Grass,” The Hudson Review XXVIII, 3: 352–356.
26. The left quarter or fifth of a poem torn vertically.
27. Largely conjecture and restoration.
28. Bonnard gives “ear dripping blood.”
29. This sounds like Courtly Love. It is rather raw sexual desire.
50. Since Demeas of Paros has explained that the imagery of the gathering storm is from a poem about the beginning of a war, I have supplied “War, Glaukos, war!” as an extra line to the fragment.
53. From a paraphrase.
54. More literally, and more mysterious, “Having hanged themselves, they vomited their mass of pride.”
58. The middle of three lines.
64. Line endings only legible.
71. Torn down both sides.
73. [334] Only the first line is Archilochos; the rest is probably an imitation (Lasserre).
75. Bonnard translates Ensmonides as “son of love.”
81. “and I, I” is a conjecture of Lasserre’s.
86. Tuché and Moira, Luck and Fate (or Accident and Predestination, Fortune and Destiny).
94. This is a larger fragment of 67 (“Thief and the night., Thief and the night”), a line known in Eustathius before the recovery of a papyrus version. And see Edmonds 46.
95. Both sides of the poem torn away.
99. A fragment with three mutilated words.
102. An Olympic victory chant.
105
. A guess, possibly a wild one.
113. This satire was provoked by the superstitious reaction to the solar eclipse of 14 March 711 B.C.
118. This fragment has also been translated as the opening of 175.
119. An indecipherable fragment of which this is lines 14–l5 only.
122. A ruin of paper and the translation neater than called for.
124. The only decipherable word among the remains of five.
125. Conjecture; scarcely legible.
126. “Calamitous” is a conjecture. “Wretched” perhaps.
136. Partly conjecture.
137. Fragment torn on both sides.
138. The Greek is simply frog. The context would be either a fable or an insult, hence the extension beyond lexicography.
142. Restoration by Lasserre.
144. The first line is supplied. Plutarch quotes the passage, saying that Fortune is like the woman in Archilochos who carries water in one hand, fire in the other.
145. Both sides of the poem torn away.
146. Moeurs asiatiques.
150. Field canteen.
152. Only the ykide of Kyrikides can be read.
161. [193] Bonnard translates this tu n’as done pas de coeur au ventre; Edmonds: for thou hast no gall to thy liver. I don’t know what it means.
166. The Greek is not as coherent as my English.
168. Falstaff at Shrewsbury.
169. Severely mutilated except for two lines. Field hospital.
173. The Greek is not as clear as the translation.
175. Only the left-hand side of the fragment exists, and a fair amount of guesswork went into stitching the sense together.
182. A conjectural restoration.
183. Translated by substituting the seven appropriate English words for the seven Greek ones. The alternate version is to suggest what seems to me to be the tone. Aesop derives from Archilochos. Ezra Pound, reading this translation in 1964, remarked of this fragment that there is a magpie in China that can turn a hedgehog over and kill it.
184. Death as a gift again. See 16.
191. Troop ship.
192. From a paraphrase.
199. The paeon is a hymn either to Apollo or to Asklepios, both gods of healing and of particular importance to soldiers.
200. A spurious fragment.
202. Badly damaged.
203. Much restored. The original, a quotation by Demeas of Paros, seems to have received a shotgun blast.
206. Same as 227 (I knocked him out the door with a vine-stump cudgel). Lasserre emended the old reading door to mountain. The verb in each means to attack with a cudgel.
209. The grotesque satire, obviously sexual, in these two fragments has generated some curious explanations. All that’s certain is that the meaning is obscene.
215. [211] A “black-butted” fellow, literally.
228. Two mutilated words, one restored by Lasserre.
232. Neobulé, daughter of Lykambes.
239. “Swordsman” I’ve supplied, since a “son of Ares” would be a soldier.
244. Unless we count a tmesis in the Iliad, this is the first appearance of panhellinic.
250. Torn down both sides, restored by Lasserre.
251. Right side missing.
255. The same as 266. Bonnard translates: et trancha les nerfs de son membre; Edmonds,fracti sunt nervi mentulae. I give this reading at 266; the reading here was arrived at torturously and I let it stand as a signpost to all the pitfalls of translators. Plutarch remarks of the man who threw a rock at a dog and hit his mother-in-law that there’s something to be said for most failures.
258. A guess.
259. A conjectural reading.
268. From a paraphrase. Hyperbole, one would think.
275. Three discrete fragments that fit together neatly.
276. Lucian’s paraphrase of an unknown passage in Archilochos. Plutarch also mentions it.
279. Possibly an overtranslation, I have extended the image of the sea combed by the wind into what seems to be a permissible conceit: nostalgia, loneliness, combing, woman.
281. Birdnest supplied by conjecture.
287. Colophon. “You have taken a cricket by the wing,” says the Greek, but Lucian in The Liar makes the context clear.
SAPPHO
Translated from Edgar Lobel and Denys Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).
1. that persuasion / fetch her: Gods, abstract concepts, and states of mind are not easily distinguishable in the Greek mind; Sappho may mean the goddess Persuasion, Peitho, daughter of Aphrodite. Sappho prefers her to her male counterpart Eros. enlist her … shield: the tight friendships of Sappho and her friends with adolescent girls seem from the military imagery to suggest a conscious parallel with that between men and boys in the Greek armies.
2. From a pottery shard. Kypris is Aphrodite.
6. Aida: Hades. Written, seemingly, to a standoffish girl. Thomas Hardy translates this in a poem called Actung.
7. Dill: the aromatic herb (anetburn graveolens), the same as we use for pickling. Its leaves, together with those of celery, were woven into garlands and worn around the head.
8. The opening lines probably mean: “lifted up / [ ] / GongyIa,” but the misreading, if misreading it be, is by this time too resonant to change, and there’s nothing crucial in them to our understanding of the fragment. Hermes: Sappho sang Ermais.
14. The marriage of Hector and Andromache. The meter and dialect are epic. The opening lines are in ruin, but Kypris is mentioned, and the herald’s name seems to be Idaos.
22. A papyrus blackened at the top and torn down the right side.
25. Elena: Helen.
26. magic liquor: nectar. There is emphatic, and was a way of designating the dwelling of the gods.
28. Gorgo is probably a nickname, an affectionate insult among close friends. Mary Barnard suggests the schoolgirlish Monkeyface as an equivalent.
29. Only the extreme left side is readable.
30. Kleïs was Sappho’s mother or daughter. This song seems to have been written during a political exile; the Kleanahides were the hostile faction in power in Lesbos.
34. For once I take garmbros (bridegroom, husband, son-in-law, kinsman) in its sense of suitor.
35. Holy goatskin: the aegis.
39. Peitho: the goddess Persuasion or Enticement.
42. Ermiona: Hermione. Elena: Helen.
44. The Muses gave the honor.
49. The butler guards the bridal chamber; the song would seem to be for the shivaree that went on all night after a wedding.
51. Aphrodite.
61. Part of the right-hand half of a poem. My opening is guesswork, based on what may be the word for an altar to Demeter.
63. The Greek contains scribe’s errors and is not at all clear.
67. A satiric version of 74.
74. Same as 67, allowing for the possibility of a serious tribute, and reading polyanaktidas as an epithet rather than a girl’s name.
75. A wedding-night song.
78. The opening line is: I honestly wish to die.
79. Ben Jonson was aware of this fragment and quotes it in The Sad Shepherd (II.vi. 85–86) as “the deare, good Angell of the Spring,/The Nightingale.”
80. Hilda Doolittle gives an imaginative extension of this fragment in her poem Fragment 113, Selected Poems (New York, 1957), pp. 36–37.
84. The last line is a guess.
107. Places sacred to Aphrodite.
109. The Greek is not clear and may be a miscopying.
112. Literally, “cool the burning desire in my heart.”
113. The sense is more blatantly Greek than I have been able to suggest: “He who is beautiful is beautiful only as long as he’s beautiful to the eyes, but he who is also good, will be beautiful all his life.”
116. After the first three lines it would seem that the song turns its attention to the bride.
118. Alkaios, Sappho’s contemporar
y and fellow poet.
124. Sophia: mastery of a skill, intelligence, wisdom.
134. The Greek is probably miscopied, filled with wordplay and puns.
136. I.e., the nature of Aphrodite.
142. The Greek is not clear.
146. The myth of Tithonos is probably alluded to in the lines about Dawn.
151. Quoted by Aristotle.
160. Gea, the earth; Ouranos, the sky.
162. The goddess Peitho, Persuasion.
165. A description of Jason’s coat.
167. Torn down both sides.
175. The names of three kinds of lyre.
181. Torn down both sides.
184. Hector.
185. Righthand side missing.
198. Or: without evil intent.
206. “some other of all mankind,” says the Greek.
ALKMAN
Translated from Alcmane: I Frammenti, Testo critico, traduzione, commentrio by Antonio Garzya (Naples, 1954).
ANAKREON
From the Greek text as established in D.L. Page’s Pæta Melici Gracis: Pætrum. Lyricorum Fragmenta qua Recens Innotuerunt, with additions from J.M. Edmonds’ Lyra Graca, Vol. II (Harvard University Press, 1952). The poems from Edmonds’ edition are epigrams ascribed to Anakreon in The Greek Anthology which Sir Denys Page thought spurious.
1. Kypris: Aphrodite.
2. The same papyrus: fragment 4. The opening image refers to boxing and probably comes from Anakreon’s athletic-erotic imagery of wrestling, running a race with, or playing ball with Eros.
3. The same papyrus. Pierides: the Muses.
4. Oxyrhynchos papyrus. The word for the boy’s shorn head, meaning something like knobby, is one used of calves’ incipient horn, so I’ve added “as a calf.”
5. Seven more lines of the preceding fragment, taken by Page and Fränkel to be from a different poem. Who “the famous woman known to all” is we no longer know.
6. Inscription for a statue of Artemis, perhaps.
7. Ialysos was one of the three Dorian cities on Rhodes.
8. This may also mean that footmen who quarrel are a nuisance.
9. That good-natured kouros Megistes: a boy old enough for military training.
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