Pindar, Dirges Fr. 131b [= Plut. consol. ad Apoll. 35.120C]
“Every human’s body is a servant to death–
Yet a shadow of life goes on living still.
This part alone
Comes from the gods. It sleeps while our limbs move
But when we sleep it shows us
in multiple dreams a choice of things to come,
Some of pleasure, some of pain.”
“When Persephone has taken the payment for that ancient pain,
From people, after nine years she gives their souls back
To the light of the sun above and from them come
Proud kings and men fast in strength and best in mind
And people call them holy heroes
for all that remains of time.”
“Lyre, don’t hang on your peg any longer,
Keeping your seven-toned voice still–
Here are my hands! I want to send
Alexander something, a golden wing of the Muses,
A centerpiece for the parties to end the month,
When the sweet pressure of fast cups
Warms the sensitive hearts of young men,
And expectation of Aphrodite mixed up
with Dionysian gifts shakes up their thoughts.
Wine makes the thoughts of men blast off!
Suddenly one is tearing down a city’s walls,
And another thinks he is king of the world!”
“Drinking toasts that stretch beyond reason bring
Pleasure for the moment but pain for all time.
The Spartan style is one of moderation:
To eat and drink with limits so people can still
Work and think. They don’t set apart a day
To soak the body with excessive drinking.”
Anonymous, To The Rhodian Winds [P. Oxy. xi. 1915, no. 1383, p. 236.]
“I used to give orders to the Rhodian winds
And the neighborhoods of the sea
When I wanted to sail
When I wanted to stay there
I used to sing to the corners of the sea:
Don’t let the waters strike me!
Put the waves at the command of the sailors!
The whole wind is pressing on us!
Love, unbeatable in war,
Love, who ravishes wealth,
Who in the soft cheeks
Of girls keeps vigil,
And who roams the seas
And rustic hideaways:
Gods can’t elude you,
Nor can mortal men.
Who admits you goes mad.
You wrench just men’s minds
Into shameful wrongs.
(This family strife between men,
It’s you who stirred it.)
Desire, clear in the eyes
Of a fetching bride, prevails.
Desire reigns
Beside the great laws.
Irresistible god
Aphrodite frolics.
“Lord, son of Leto, child of Zeus, I will never
Forget you when beginning or ending my song.
But I sing you first and last and in the middle too
Hear me now and grant me good things.
Lord Phoebus, when the goddess Leto first gave birth to you,
The finest of the gods, she was holding close to the palm tree
with her slight arms, next to the curve of the lake—
and all of Delos was overwhelmed with a divine scent
as the expansive earth laughed beneath,
and the see delighted in its salty depths.
Artemis, slayer of beasts, daughter of Zeus, the one
Agamemnon honored with a temple as he sailed to Troy in swift ships
Hear me as I pray to you—ward off the evil spirts of death.
It is a minor thing for you, goddess; but a big deal for me.”
Muses and Graces, daughters of Zeus, who once
Went to the marriage of Kadmos and sang this beautiful line:
“Whatever is beautiful is loved; and what isn’t beautiful isn’t loved’
That’s the line that rang from your immortal mouths.”
“A child, when still young and small, grows
a bulwark of teeth and loses them in his first seven years
When the god brings about the second seven years
He starts to show the signs of adolescence
In the third set of seven, his chin starts to fuzz
As his limbs thicken and skin changes color.
In the fourth seven, every one is seriously the best
In terms of strength, and men begin to show the signs of excellence.
In the fifth season, it is the time for a man to think about marriage
And to seek the generation of children afterwards.
In the six season, a man’s mind is fit for everything,
And he no longer wishes to act out in reckless deeds.
In the seventh season, and the eighth each is best
In thinking and speaking–fourteen years for both!
In the ninth season, a man can do anything, but
His speech and mind are less sharp, beneath peak excellence.
If someone completes the tenth stage and comes to the end,
his appointment with death is not out of season.”
The stages of life from infancy to old age. Woodcut from De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomeus Anglicus, 1846
I checked with my wife–a pediatric dentist–and first dentition is complete between ages 3-6. Also, we got married when I was 29 and had kids in our 30s (oops, another in our 40s). And then, in my seventh season I am definitely the best so far at speaking and thinking (and I can’t bench what I could at 25), so Solon is onto something.
This is hard to convey to someone who hasn’t read a lot of Greek poetry, but Solon is not much of a poet.
“…Polydeukes.
I do not care that Lukaisin is among the dead*
And Enasphoros and swift-footed Sebros
The violent one….
The helmeted one…
Or Euteikhes and lord Areios
Exceptional among the Heroes.
The summoner
Great Eurotos in the chaos of Ares
And Alkon, and the best men
We will certainly not ignore them.
Yet Fate and the Way
Those most ancient ones
Overcame them all
And their untethered courage
Perished.
No human should fly to the heaven
Nor try to marry Aphrodite
The Kyprian Queen
Nor some child of Porkos, the sea-god
The Graces with loving eyes
Go to visit the house of Zeus.
A deity….
For friends…
Gives gifts…
In vain…
One went, another of them dead by arrow
Another by a marble millstone…
In Hades now…
Those people
Suffered unforgettable pain
Because they had evil plans.”
Greek, Attic; Bell-krater; Vases; Obverse, Orpheus among the Thracians; Reverse, libation scene. C 440 BCE, Painter of London E 497
*I may be obtuse or too lazy to follow it up, but I cannot make sense of the Loeb translation that takes the reconstructed οὐκ ἐγὼ]ν Λύκαισον ἐν καμοῦσιν ἀλέγω as “I do not reckon L. among the dead”. It seems atypical for the semantics of the verb and thematically unrelated to the judgment of this poem.
“Theognis of Megara, from Megara in Sicily. He lived around the time of the 59th Olympiad [ c/ 540 BCE]. He composed elegy for those who were saved from the Syracusans during the siege, around 2800 elegiac proverbs, a group of elegiac advice addressed to his lover Kyrnos, and other kinds of advisory lines. Theognis is useful because he wrote advice, but in the midst of this are interwoven foul and pederastic erotic lines too and many other things rejected by clean living.”
Theognis: This dude is Megarian, from Megara in Attica. The poet says this himself [783]. Plato didn’t acknowledge this when he claimed in Laws Book 1 that Theognis was from MEgara in Sicily. Not a few have followed Plato in this.”
“This is what Xenophon says about Theognis: “The words of Megarian Theognis: This poet has composed about nothing else except for human excellence and wickedness. This poetry is a treatise on people, as if an equestrian were to write about horses.”
