Epigrams

The dewy roses and that thick-grown thyme are laid as an offering to the Muses of Helicon, and the dark-leaved laurels to you, Pythian Paean, since the Delphic rock gave you this for its glory. This horned white goat will redden your altar, he that browses on the topmost twig of the terebinth.

Daphnis of the fair skin, who on his lovely pipe made music of country songs, dedicated these to Pan: his pierced reeds, his throwing-stick, his sharp javelin, a fawnskin, and the wallet in which he once carried apples.

You sleep, Daphnis, resting your wearied body on the leaf-strewn ground, and your hunting-stakes stand fresh-planted on the hills. But Pan is hunting you, and Priapus too, with the saffron ivy bound about his lovely brow, both striding side by side into your cave. Quick, then, away! Away — shake off the deep drowsiness that steals upon you.

When you have turned that lane, goatherd, past the oaks, you will find a figure new-carved from a fig-tree, three-legged, still in its bark, earless, yet able with its generative member to do the work of love. A sacred enclosure runs around it, and an ever-flowing stream from the cliffs makes all things bloom on every side with laurels and myrtles and fragrant cypress. There, all about, the vine with its curling tendrils spreads its clusters, and in spring the blackbirds pour out their melodies in clear-voiced, intricate song. The tawny nightingales answer them with their warbling, sounding from their throats the honey-sweet note. Sit down there, then, and pray to gracious Priapus that he free me from my longing for Daphnis, and say that at once I will sacrifice a fine kid. If he refuses, should I win Daphnis I am willing to offer three victims: I will sacrifice a heifer, a shaggy goat, and the lamb I keep in the fold. May the god hear me with favour.

Will you, by the Nymphs, play me something sweet on the double pipes? And I, taking up my harp, will begin to strike a tune, and the herdsman Daphnis will join us, charming us, his breath on the wax-bound reeds. Standing near, behind the cave by the shaggy oak, let us rob goat-mounting Pan of his sleep.

Ah, poor Thyrsis, what good is it, if you waste away your two eyes with tears, mourning? The kid is gone, your fair young one, gone to Hades; for the cruel wolf has crushed her in his jaws. The dogs are baying; but what good is it, when of her not a bone nor an ash is left, now she is gone?

You left a young son behind, and you yourself in your prime, Eurymedon, met your death and won this tomb. For you there is a seat among the godlike men; and your son the citizens will honour, remembering his father as a good man.

The son of Paeon came even to Miletus, to dwell with Nicias, a man who heals the sick, who day after day approaches him with offerings, and who had this statue carved from fragrant cedar, promising to Eetion, for the supreme skill of his deft hand, a fee; and Eetion poured all his art into the work.

Stranger, a man of Syracuse, Orthon, lays this charge upon you: never go abroad drunk on a stormy night. For I too met such a fate; and instead of my own broad homeland I lie here, wrapped in a foreign soil.

To you, all nine goddesses, this gift to delight you, this marble statue, Xenocles set up, a man of music; none will say otherwise. And for this skill winning praise, he does not forget the Muses.

This is the monument of Eusthenes, the wise reader of faces, keen to know the very mind from the eye. His companions buried him well, a stranger in a strange land, and to them the maker of songs was wondrously dear. All that befits him the dead philosopher had, and though he was without strength, he had, it seems, those who cared.

Demomeles the choragus, who set up the tripod, Dionysus, and you, sweetest of the blessed gods, was temperate in all things, and won victory with his chorus of men, with an eye to what was beautiful and fitting.

This Cypris is not the goddess of the common crowd. Propitiate her, calling her the Heavenly One, the offering of chaste Chrysogone in the house of Amphicles, with whom she shared children and a life. And always from year to year things went better for them, since they made their beginning from you, lady; for those who care for the immortals themselves fare the better, mortals though they are.

To citizens and strangers alike this bank deals fairly: deposit, and draw out by reckoning, the account being kept straight. Let another man make excuses; but Caïcus counts out to those who wish it, even at night, the money of foreigners.

"I shall learn whether you grant any more to the good, or whether the coward gets from you, traveller, the same equal share. Fare well, this tomb," you will say, "since over the sacred head of Eurymedon it lies light."

This child went, untimely, in her seventh year to Hades, before many of her own age, poor girl, longing for her brother of twenty months, the infant who tasted loveless death. Alas, Peristere, your sufferings move pity — how close at hand heaven has set the bitterest sorrows for mankind.

Look at this statue, stranger, closely, and say when you come home: "In Teos I saw the likeness of Anacreon, the supreme songmaker of those of old." And adding that he delighted in the young, you will speak the whole man, exactly.

The speech is Dorian, and the man is he who found comedy — Epicharmus. O Bacchus, in bronze instead of in the flesh they set him up here for you, the men who dwell in the great city of Syracuse, as is fitting for so great a fellow-citizen; for he had a store of sayings, and to those who remember he repays his wages well. Many things useful for life he told to all. Great is the thanks owed to him.

The maker of songs Hipponax lies here. If you are base, do not draw near his tomb; but if you are honest and come of honest stock, sit down with confidence, and if you wish, take a nap.

Little Medeius set up this monument to his Thracian nurse beside the road, and wrote on it her name, Cleita. The woman will have her thanks in return for this, because she reared the boy. And why not? She is still called of service.

Stop and look upon Archilochus, the poet of old, the maker of iambics, whose boundless fame spread both towards night and towards the dawn. Truly the Muses loved him, and Delian Apollo, so tuneful and so skilled was he made in fashioning verses and singing to the lyre.

This son of Zeus, the man here portrayed, the lion-fighter, the swift of hand — first of the songmakers of old, Peisander of Camirus set down in writing, and told of all the labours he toiled through. And the people themselves — that you may know it clearly — set him up here, made in bronze, many months and years afterwards.

From the "Berenice" And if any man asks for good fishing and prosperity, he whose livelihood is from the sea, whose nets are his plough, let him sacrifice at nightfall to this goddess the sacred fish that they call the white one, for it is holiest of all, and then he may set his nets and draw them from the sea brimming full.

Megara Mother of mine, why do you wound your heart so within you, grieving so terribly, and why is the bloom no longer kept on your cheeks? What has so deeply pained you? Is it that my glorious son suffers boundless toils under a worthless man, as a lion under a fawn? Ah me, why have the immortal gods so dishonoured me? Why did my parents bear me to so evil a fate? Wretched that I am, who, when I came to the bed of a blameless man, honoured him as the light of my own eyes, and even now revere and stand in awe of him in my heart; yet no man living was ever more ill-fated than he, nor tasted so many sorrows in his own thoughts. The cruel one, who with the bow that Apollo himself gave him, or the dread shafts of some Death-spirit or Fury, slew his own children and took the dear life from them, raging through the house, and was filled with their slaughter. These I, the wretched one, saw with my own eyes struck down by their father; such a thing has come to no other even in a dream. Nor could I help them, though they cried again and again to their mother, for the evil near at hand was not to be overcome. As a bird laments over its own nestlings perishing, which a dread serpent, while they are still callow, devours among the thick bushes, and over them the mother flies, crying very shrill, a lady in her grief, yet cannot bring her young any aid; for to come nearer is a great terror, before the pitiless monster — so I, mother of such sorrows, wailing for my dear offspring, roamed up and down the house on frenzied feet. Would that I too had died together with my children and lay there, with the poisoned arrow through my liver, or had been brought down by your gentle shafts, Artemis, mighty queen over womankind. Then our parents, weeping over us, with their own dear hands would have set us upon a common pyre with many funeral gifts, and gathering the bones of us all into one golden urn would have buried us where first we were born. But now they dwell in Thebes, the nurse of horses, ploughing the deep soil of the Aonian plain; while I, in Tiryns, the rugged city of Hera, unhappy, am stricken in my heart with many griefs always alike; and there is for me no respite from tears. My husband I see for only a little while with my eyes in our home; for many labours lie ready before him, which, wandering over land and sea, he toils at, having within his breast a mind of rock or iron, strong; while you, like water, melt away, weeping by night and through all the days that Zeus sends down. No one else of my kin could stand beside me and gladden my heart; for the wall of our home does not shut them in. Indeed they all dwell far across the pine-clad Isthmus, and there is no one to whom I, an utterly luckless woman, might look and revive my dear heart, except for Pyrrha, my own sister; and she herself grieves all the more for her own husband Iphicles, your son; for of all children I think you have borne the most wretched to a god and to a mortal man. So she spoke; and tears more swelling than apples poured down from her eyelids into her lovely bosom, as she remembered her children and her parents after them. And just so Alcmene wetted her white cheeks with tears; and groaning heavily from her heart, with close-pressed words she answered her dear daughter-in-law thus: "Strange one of my children, what is this that has fallen into your shrewd mind? How do you wish to stir us both, speaking of griefs not to be forgotten? They are not now wept for the first time. Is it not enough, the sorrows that hold us ever to the very last day of our lives? A lover of lamentation indeed would he be, whoever should count . . . . . . over our griefs take heart. Not such a fate did we receive from heaven. And I see you yourself, dear child, toiling in unwearying sorrows. I forgive you your distress, even when there is satiety of joy itself. And I grieve for you exceedingly and pity you, because you have shared in our wretched destiny, which hangs heavy above our heads. For let the Maiden be my witness, and fair-robed Demeter — by whom one greatly wronged, if he willingly swore a false oath against his enemies, would suffer terribly — that in my heart I love you no less than if you had come forth from my own womb and had been my cherished maiden daughter in our halls. And I do not think this is altogether hidden from you yourself. So never say, my flower, that I neglect you, not even if I weep more thickly than fair-haired Niobe. For there is nothing to be reproached in a mother's mourning for a suffering child; since ten months I laboured before ever I saw him, carrying him beneath my heart, and he brought me near to Aïdoneus, the keeper of the gate; so hard was my labour, the cruel pangs I endured for him. And now my son has gone from me, to accomplish a new task in a foreign land; nor do I know, ill-starred that I am, whether I shall welcome him back here again, or not. And besides, a dread dream has terrified me through my sweet sleep; I am sorely afraid, having seen a sinister vision, that some misfortune may befall my children. For there seemed to me to be holding a well-wrought mattock in his hands, my son, the might of Heracles, in both of them; with it he was digging, as though for hire, a great trench at the edge of some flourishing field, naked, without cloak or fair-girdled tunic. But when he came to the end of all his work, toiling at the strong fence of the wine-bearing vineyard, he was about to lean his spade against the projecting bank and to put on the clothes he had worn before; when suddenly there flared up above the deep ditch an insatiable fire, and an unspeakable flame coiled about him. But he kept ever drawing back on swift feet, eager to escape the deadly force of Hephaestus; and always before his body, like a shield, he held the mattock; and his eyes turned this way and that, that the hostile fire might not consume him. Then, as it seemed to me, eager to help him, great-hearted Iphicles slipped and fell to the ground before he could come, nor could he rise upright again, but lay there motionless, like a feeble old man whom joyless age, against his will, has forced to fall, and he lies fixed there upon the earth until someone of the passers-by draws him up by the hand, in reverence for the awesome respect due to a grey beard. So upon the ground lay shield-wielding Iphicles. But I kept weeping as I watched my children helpless, until sweet sleep fled from my eyes, and at once bright dawn came. Such dreams, dear one, terrified my mind all through the night; but may they all turn against Eurystheus, away from our house, and may my own heart prove the prophet for him, and may heaven bring nothing else to pass."