A beautiful Pocket Poet selection of short poems, odes, and epigrams from ancient Greece, translated into English by a wide array of distinguished translators and poets
Poems from Greek Antiquity presents a gloriously compact treasury of the enduring and influential poems of the ancient Greeks. Greek literature abounds in masterpieces, the most famous of which are lengthy epics, but it is also rich in poems of much smaller compass than The Iliad or The Odyssey. The short poems, odes, and epigrams included in this volume span a vast period of more than a thousand years. Included here are selections from the early lyric and elegiac poets, the Alexandrian poets, Alcaeus, Sappho, Pindar, and many more. Here, too, are poems drawn from the celebrated Greek Anthology, and from the Anacreontea, the collection of odes on the pleasures of drink, love, and beauty that have been popular for centuries both in the original Greek and in English. Excerpts from somewhat longer poems include Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Homeric Hymn to Mercury" and the hugely entertaining Homeric pastiche "The Battle of the Frogs and Mice." The English translations in this volume are works of art in their own right and come from a wide range of remarkable poets and translators, ranging from George Chapman in the seventeenth century to Robert Fagles in the twentieth.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Preface
SOME EARLY GREEK POETS
From Hesiod’s Works and Days
Winter
From Homeric Hymn to Mercury (Hermes)
Battle of the Frogs and Mice, or Batrachomyomachia
Alcman
Mimnermus
Archilochus
Pindar
Bacchylides
Theognis of Megara
Sappho
Alcaeus
Anon. Swallow Mask Song of Rhodian Children
ALEXANDRIAN POETS
Bion of Smyrna
Moschus
Apollonius of Rhodes, From Argonautica
Lycophron, From Alexandra
Theocritus of Syracuse
From THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY
Introduction
Aesopus
Agathias
Antipater of Sidon
Antipater of Thessalonica
Anyte
Apollonides
Archias
Ariston
Asclepiades of Samos
[Lollius] Bassus
Bianor
Callimachus
Constantine Cephalas
Crinagoras of Mytilene
Dionysius Sophistes
Eratosthenes Scholasticus
Erycius
Euenus
Glaucus
Glycon
Joannes Barbucallus
Julian, Prefect of Egypt
Leonidas of Tarentum
Lucianus
Lucillius
Macedonius
Marcus Argentarius
Meleager of Gadara
Metrodorus
Mnasalces
Moero of Byzantium
Nicharchus
Nossis, the poetess of Locri
Palladas
Paul the Silentiary
Perses
Phaedimos of Bisanthe
Philip of Thessalonica
Philodemus
Plato the comic poet
Posidippus
Rhianus
Rufinus
Simonides
Statyllius Flaccus
Strato of Sardis
Theocritus
Trajan, Emperor
Thucydides
Thymocles
Some Versions by Ezra Pound
Anonymous Epigrams translated by Various Hands
Appendix of Imitations
From ANACREONTEA
Introduction
Theocritus, ‘On Anacreon’s statue’
Odes
Biographies of Translators
Acknowledgments
