By Night and Lamp - The World of Meleager
The poet Meleagros, known to us by his Latinized name Meleager, lived in the first century BCE. Born in Gadara in what is modern-day Jordan and spending most of his years in the Greek-speaking city of Tyre in modern-day Lebanon, he spent his last decades on the Aegean island of Kos. In his poetry he is as Greek as any Athenian, and as the compiler and editor of the first great anthology of Greek lyrics, epigrams, and fragments, he knew the mythology and literature of the Hellenic world through and through.
Like his forerunner Callimachus, Meleager devoted most of his poems to a self-effacing confession of his failed and thwarted love affairs, with both women and men. He met his match in the brilliant woman Heliodora, but her scandalous infidelities drove him away in jealous rage. The singer Zenophila also charmed him, but the outcome was the same. Blame two meddlers for Meleager’s troubles: the goddess Aphrodite, and her son Eros (Cupid) who kept everyone in an endless circus of new amours and trysts. No one was to blame with Love’s arrows flying in every direction, and if same-sex love happens, too, that was fine with the frat-boy idlers of Tyrene and Kos who attracted Meleager’s attention.
Meleager is more than a love-poet. His sober poems about fate, philosophy, and the Underworld show us the sombre uncertainties of the pagan world. In one monologue from an imaginary tragedy, a messenger describes to Queen Niobe the cruel death of her children, killed by spiteful gods.
This volume combines, translates, adapts, and expands 70 of Meleager’s poems, arranged to present a portrait of a complex and passionate man, and of daily life and love affairs in the first century BCE. The form is improvised free verse, with a nod to the elegance and restraint of Roman poetry.
This is the 312th publication of The Poet’s Press.
