Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

THe PoEMS OF THE ANTHOLOGY

r. STRATON oF Sarpis. (Anth. Pal., xii, 1, 2, 5, 244, 198, 201, 227, 180, 195)

This poet, who lived in the time of the emperor Hadrian, arranged a collection of epigrams on beautiful boys, and the twelfth book of the Anthology contains ninety-four poems under his name.

The collection does not begin with an invocation of the Muses, as the poems of antiquity usually do, but of Zeus, who in very ancient times had himself set the example to men by the carrying off of Ganymede and since then was regarded as the patron of the love of boys. The subject of which the poet intends to treat differs considerably from that which had hitherto been usual: ‘“‘ Look not in my pages for Priam by the altar, nor for the woes of Medea and Niobe, nor for Itys in his chamber and the nightingales amid the leaves ; for earlier poets wrote of all these things in profusion. But look for sweet love mingled with the jolly Graces, and for Bacchus. No grave face suits them.”

Straton’s Muse also had to do with boys, but as there is no difference and no choice, he loves all who are beautiful. Nothing can resist this love, it is stronger than the poet, who no doubt would many times like to shake off the yoke, but time after time perceives that it is beyond him. If the boy is beautiful and above all his looks so charming that one can see that the Graces have stood by his cradle, then the poet cannot rejoice enough ; certainly, the greater the beauty, the more speedy the complaint that it is only transitory and immediately disappears.

The great passion finds its expression also in poetry, and the twelfth book of the Anthology accordingly also contains a number of strongly erotic epigrams, many of them, indeed, highly obscene according to modern feeling.

479