These books are very different from each other, nor do they all restrict their selection to the Greek Anthology.(**) But all three give us an interesting glimpse into ancient Greek lyric poetry. West's Greek Lyric Poetry, Burton Raffel's Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments, and Kenneth Rexroth's Poems from the Greek Anthology, at least to begin. Paton in the Harvard Loeb series (and therefore in some of the stiffest English imaginable).Īfter casting about for guidance here and there and then sampling some of the texts, I settled on M.L. To read the entire anthology would be quite a task, though it is available in English in a five volume bilingual edition by W.R. So, one is faced with the problem of deciding which selections and translators one should read. So the text suffered some serious violations at the hands of medieval monks and self-righteous Victorians, among others.Īn additional complication is that there are dozens and dozens of translations of selections of poems from the Anthology, and that all these translators have very different ideas of how to render the poems into English. The Greek Anthology has a very complicated textual history, not the least reason for which is the fact that many of the sentiments expressed by poems in the collection, particularly of a sexual nature, were not of the sort that soothed Christian spirits. It is the richest source we have of ancient Greek lyric poetry, as opposed to their more familiar epics, didactic poetry and poetic dramas. The Greek Anthology is an unusual text with roots in an anthology of epigrams first compiled by Meleager of Gadara in the 1st century BCE and supplemented over the centuries by various editors/compilers until it contained over 4,000 poems of various length and type including epitaphs and prayers.(*) The poems date between the 7th century BCE through the 6th century CE.

For it knows how he celebrates you in the dark.

Greek Lyric Poetry by M.L. West