Greek Anthology Books 10-12

ToposText · Greek Anthology · 828 sections

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§ 11.274 LUCIAN Tell me, I ask you, Hermes, how did the soul of Lollianus go down to the house of Persephone? If in silence, it was a marvel, and very likely he wanted to teach you also something. Heavens, to think of meeting that man even when one is dead!
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§ 11.275 APOLLONIUS (RHODIUS) Callimachus the outcast, the butt, the wooden head I The origin is Callimachus who wrote the Origins.
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§ 11.276 LUCILIUS Indolent Marcus once, when cast into prison, confessed to a murder of his own accord, being too lazy to come out.
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§ 11.277 LUCILIUS Lazy Marcus, having once run in his sleep, never went to sleep again lest he should chance to run once more.
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§ 11.278 LUCILIUS On a Cuckold Grammarian Outside you teach the woes of Paris and Menelaus, having at home plenty of Parises for your Helen.
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§ 11.279 LUCILIUS None of the grammarians can ever be moderate, as from the very beginning he has wrath, and spite, and bile.i
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§ 11.280 PALLADAS Better to be judged by Hegemon, the slayer of robbers, than to fall into the hands of the surgeon Gennadius. For he executes murderers in just hatred, but Gennadius takes a fee for sending you down to Hades.
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§ 11.281 PALLADAS On Magnus the Expert Physician When Magnus went down to Hades, Pluto trembled and said: “He has come to set the dead, too, on their legs.”
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§ 11.282 Anonymous I lament no longer those who have left the sweet daylight, but those who ever live in expectation of death.
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§ 11.283 PALLADAS On Demonictis the Prefect Many people say many things, but yet they cannot express in words all the currents of your vices. But there is one strange and incredible thing I marvelled at in you: how, while you were stealing, you had tears ready to hand. Coming from the land of Chalcis he deprived our city of brass, stealing and stealing with profitable tears.
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§ 11.284 PALLADAS on the same From the land of the Lotophagi came the great leader Lycaon, from the land of Chalcis begotten by unnatural sex (?).
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§ 11.285 PALLADAS on the same We marvelled at another strange, effeminate characteristic. He wept while stealing, pitying those he was robbing; he who, while robbing, observed ceremonial purity, and while thus affecting purity went on despoiling, a man with nothing clean about him, not even his person free of dirt.
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§ 11.286 PALLADAS “Nothing is worse than a woman, even a good one ”; and nothing is worse than a slave, even a good one. But still one requires necessary evils. Do you suppose a slave bears his master affection? A good slave would be he who broke both his legs.
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§ 11.287 PALLADAS He who is cursed with an ugly wife sees darkness when he lights the lamps in the evening.
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§ 11.288 PALLADAS A barber and a tailor came to blows with each other, and soon the needles got the better of the razor.
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§ 11.289 PALLADAS O swiftest ravishment of life! A money-lender, while marking down on his tablets the interest of years, died instantly in the space of a moment, still grasping his interest in his fingers.
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§ 11.290 PALLADAS One holding in his fingers a reckoning counter for the fingers went by the counter-vote of death in double-quick time to Hades. The counter now lives bereaved of the reckoner, whose soul is rapidly driven from hence.
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§ 11.291 PALLADAS What good do you do to the city by writing verses, getting so much gold for your slanders, selling iambic verses as a shopman sells oil?
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§ 11.292 PALLADAS On a certain Philosopher who became Prefect of Constantinople in the reign of Valentinian and Valens Thou, seated above the heavenly wheel, hast desired a silver wheel. Oh, infinite shame! Erst thou wast of higher station and hast straight become much lower. Ascend hither to the depths; for now thou hast descended to the heights.
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§ 11.293 PALLADAS Olympius promised me a horse, but brought me a tail from which hung a horse at its last gasp.
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§ 11.294 LUCILIUS Thou hast the wealth of a rich man, but the soul of a pauper, thou who art rich for thy heirs and poor for thyself.
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§ 11.295 LUCILIUS If thou hast any Dionysus in thy house, take off the ivy from his head and crown him with lettuce leaves.
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§ 11.296 TIMON On Cleanthes the Philosopher Who is this who like a ram stalks through the ranks of men a slow-coach, an Assian mill-stone of words, a spiritless block?
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§ 11.297 Anonymous on a Tippling Old Woman A. How is it, mother, that thou lovest wine more than me, thy son? Give me wine to drink since once thou didst give me milk. B. My son, my milk once stilled thy thirst, but now drink water and still thy own thirst.
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§ 11.298 Anonymous See how the son athirst reaches out his hand to his mother, and the woman, being a thorough woman, overcome by wine, drinking from a jar, spoke thus, looking askance: “How shall I give thee to drink, my son, from a little droppie, for this jar holds but thirty pints.” “Mother, who hast rather the harsh nature of a step-mother, give me to quaff these tears of the sweetest vine.” “Mother, evil mother, pitiless at heart, if thou lovest me, thy son, give me but a little to quaff.”
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§ 11.299 PALLADAS Thou waxest wanton! What wonder? Does it distress me? No, I bear with thee. For the boldness of the wanton is their punishment.
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§ 11.300 PALLADAS Thou speakest much, O man, but in a little thou shalt be laid on the ground. Silence, and while thou yet livest meditate on death.
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§ 11.301 PALLADAS The Sun to men is the god of light, but if he too were insolent to them in his shining, they would not desire even light.
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§ 11.302 PALLADAS Thou hast not insulted me, but my poverty; but if Zeus dwelt on earth in poverty, he himself also would have suffered insult.
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§ 11.303 PALLADAS If I am poor, what shall it harm me? Why dost thou hate me who do no wrong? This is the fault of Fortune, not a vice of character.
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§ 11.304 PALLADAS All are cowards and braggarts and whatever other fault there may be among men, yet he who has reason does not expose his fault to his neighbour, but in his wisdom hides it within. But thy soul's door is flung wide open, and it is evident to all when thou crouchest in terror or art too brazen.
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§ 11.305 PALLADAS Child of shamelessness, most ignorant of men, nursling of folly, tell why dost thou hold thy head high, knowing nothing? Among the grammarians thou art the Platonist, and if anyone enquire as to Plato's doctrines thou art again a grammarian. From one thing thou takest refuge in another and thou neither knowest the Art of Grammar nor art thou a Platonist.
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§ 11.306 PALLADAS Though you leave Alexandria for Antioch, and after Syria land in Italy no man in power will ever wed you. The fact is you always are fancying that some one will, and therefore skip from city to city.
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§ 11.307 PALLADAS Your son is called Eros and your wife Aphrodite, and so, blacksmith, it is quite fair you should have a lame leg.
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§ 11.308 LUCILIUS Lean Cleonicus, making a hole in his foot with the needle, himself made a hole in the needle with his foot.2
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§ 11.309 LUCILIUS Thrasymachus, you lost great wealth by a plot, and, poor fellow, you have suddenly come to naught after all your economising, lending, exacting interest, drinking water, often not even eating, so as to have a little more money. But if you calculate what starvation was then and what it is now, you have no less now than you then seemed to have.
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§ 11.310 LUCILIUS You bought hair, rouge, honey, wax, and teeth. For the same outlay you might have bought a face.
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§ 11.311 LUCILIUS Pantaenetus is so lazy that when he fell sick of a fever he prayed to every god never to get up again. And now he leaves his bed unwillingly, and in his heart blames the deaf ears of the unjust gods.
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§ 11.312 LUCILIUS Though there is no one dead here now, O passer-by, Marcus the poet built a tomb here, and writing an inscription of one line as follows, engraved it: “Weep for twelve year old Maximus from Ephesus.” I (says the tomb) never even saw any Maximus, but to show off the poet's talent I bid the passer-by weep.
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§ 11.313 LUCILIUS One, bidding me to a banquet, killed me with silver hunger, serving famished dishes. And in wrath I spoke amid the silver sheen of hunger: “Where is the plenty of my earthenware dishes? ”
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§ 11.314 LUCILIUS I sought whence I should say the word pinakes (dishes) was derived, and on being invited by you I found out why they are so called. For you placed before me great pinakes of great peina (hunger), famished dishes, instruments of famine.
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§ 11.315 LUCILIUS Antiochus once set eyes on Lysimachus' cushion, and Lysimachus never set eyes on it again.
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§ 11.316 Anonymous Milo the wrestler was once the only one who came to the sacred games, and the steward of the games called him to crown him at once. But as he was approaching he slipped and fell on his back, and the people called out: “Do not crown this man, as he got a fall when he was alone! ” But he, standing up in their midst, shouted back: “Are there not three falls? I fell once; now let someone give me the other two.”
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§ 11.317 PALLADAS Someone gave me a long-suffering donkey that moves backwards as much as forward their journey's haven to those who ride on it; a donkey, the son of slowness, a labour, a delay, a dream, but first instead of last for those who are retiring.
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§ 11.318 PHILODEMUS Anticrates knew the constellations much better than Aratus, but could not tell his own nativity; for he said he was in doubt whether he was born in the Ram or the Twins, or in both the Fishes. But it was clearly found to be in all three, for he is a tupper and a fool, and effeminate, and fond of fish.
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§ 11.319 AUTO MEDON If you bring ten sacks of charcoal you, too, will be a citizen, and if you bring a pig, also, you will be Triptolemus himself, and to Heraclides your introducer must be given either some cabbage castocks, or lentils, or snails. Have these with you and call yourself Erechtheus, Cecrops, Codrus, whoever you like; no one minds a rap about it.
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§ 11.320 ARGENTARIUS Philostratus loved Antigone. He was poorer by five cubits, poor fellow, than Irus. The cold, however, taught him a sweet remedy; for tucking up his knees (with antia gonata) he slept so, stranger, with Antigone.
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§ 11.321 PHILIPPUS Grammarians, ye children of Stygian Momus, ye book-worms feeding on thorns, demon foes of books, dogs of Zenodotus, soldiers of Callimachus from whom, though you hold him out as a shield, you do not refrain your tongue, hunters of melancholy conjunctions who take delight in min and sphin and in enquiring if the Cyclops had dogs, may ye wear yourselves away for all eternity, ye wretches, muttering abuse of others; then come and quench your venom in me.
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§ 11.322 ANTIPHANES Idly curious race of grammarians, ye who dig up by the roots the poetry of others; unhappy bookworms that walk on thorns, defilers of the great, proud of your Erinna, bitter and dry dogs set on by Callimachus, bane of poets, darkness to little beginners, away with you, bugs that secretly bite the eloquent.
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§ 11.323 PALLADAS Corakes ( crows ) and colakes (flatterers) are only distinguished by Rho and Lambda. Therefore a crow and a lick-spittle flatterer are the same thing. So, my good sir, beware of this beast, knowing that flatterers are crows that pick the living too.
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§ 11.324 AUTOMEDON A. Accept, Phoebus, the supper I bring thee. B. I will accept it if someone lets me. A. Then, Son of Leto, is there something that thou too dost fear? B. No one else but only Arrius, for he, that ministrant of an altar that smells not of fat, has a more powerful claw than a robber-hawk, and once he has celebrated the procession he walks back carrying off everything. There is great virtue in Jove's ambrosia, for I should be one of you' if a god, too, could feel hunger.
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§ 11.325 AUTOMEDON Having supped yesterday on a leg of an old goat and the yellow stalk, ten days old, of a cabbage like hemp, I am shy of mentioning the man who invited me; for he is short-tempered, and I am not a little afraid of his asking me again.
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§ 11.326 AUTOMEDON Beard and rough hair on the thighs, how quickly time changes all! Connichus, is this what you have become? Did I not say, “Be not in all things harsh and discourteous; Beauty has its own Avenging Deities”? So you have come into the pen, proud youth; we know that you wish for it now; but then, too, you might have had sense.
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§ 11.327 ANTIPATER OF THESSALONICA (?) Lycaenis with the dry back, the disgrace of Aphrodite, with less haunches than any deer, with whom, as the saying is, a drunken goatherd would not live. G-r-r, g-r-r! such are the wives of the Sidonians.
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§ 11.328 NICARCHUS Hermogenes, Cleobulus and I used to engage the same woman, Aristodike, for our common amour; I myself was allotted the “grey salt sea to dwell;” For we divided her one part for each, not all for everyone. So Hermogenes drew the “wide, grim abode,” descending to the final unseen country, where are the shores of dead souls and the wind-blown wild fig-trees are twisted by the breath of the rough-howling winds. Put Cleobulus as Zeus, who drew the ascent to heaven, “holding in his hand the smoldering fire.” Earth stayed “common to all,” for spreading a straw mat on it we divided the old woman in this way.
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§ 11.329 NICARCHUS Demonax, do not always turn down your eyes, nor indulge your tongue; the pig has a formidable thorn. And you live... and sleep in Phoenicia, and though not Semele's son, art nourished by a thigh.
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§ 11.330 NICARCHUS I was invited yesterday, Demetrius, and came to supper today. Don't find fault with me; you have a long staircase. I spent an age on it, and I should not have got safe up it today only I came up holding on to a donkey's tail. You touch the stars: Zeus, it seems, when he ran away with Ganymede, went up with him by this route. But from here how long will it take you to reach Hades? You are not wanting in cleverness; you have hit on a trick for being immortal.
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§ 11.331 NICARCHUS Philo had a boat called the “ Saviour,” but in it perhaps not even Zeus himself can be saved. Its name only was Saviour, but the passengers sailed either close to land or to Persephone.
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§ 11.332 NICARCHUS Icander the captain embarked us, it seems, on his twenty-oarer, not for a sail, but to bale her out. For the water in her is not little, but Poseidon seems to sail over in her to the opposite shore. It is the first time a ship with the dropsy has been seen. But I, at least, fear lest you may see what was once a long boat turn into our long home.
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§ 11.333 CALLICTER Rhodon removes leprosy and scrofula by drugs, but he removes everything else even without drugs.
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§ 11.334 Anonymous Someone, hearing that “ Damagoras ” and “pestilence” were numerical equivalents, weighed the character of both from the beam of the balance. But the scale, when raised, was pulled down on Damagoras' side, and he found pestilence lighter.
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§ 11.335 Anonymous O unhappy Cynegirus, how among the living and in death art thou hacked by words and axes! Formerly thy hand fell fighting in the war, and now the grammarian has deprived thee of a foot.
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§ 11.336 Anonymous Carinus, after receiving the spoils of Asia, set sail on a winter's day at the setting of the Kids. Nemesis, too, saw the cargo, but he departed in her sight and laughing at the gods of the sea.
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§ 11.337 Anonymous You are a senator, Agathinus, but tell me how much you paid now for the Beta, for formerly it was Delta.
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§ 11.338 Anonymous Homer taught you to call the voice enope, but who taught you to have your tongue enope (exposed to view?)
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§ 11.339 Anonymous You wag your head and you waggle your butt; the first like a raving lunatic, the second like someone who has been penetrated.
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§ 11.340 PALLADAS I swore ten thousand times to make no more epigrams, for I had brought on my head the enmity of many fools, but when I set eyes on the face of the Paphlagonian Pentagathus I can't repress the malady.
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§ 11.341 PALLADAS It is best to praise, and blaming is the cause of enmity, but yet to speak ill of others is Attic honey.
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§ 11.342 Anonymous You put the ruptured man's rupture in front of him, he himself not being visible. Don't present me to the rupture; I want to see the man himself.
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§ 11.343 Anonymous Silvanus has two servants. Wine and Sleep; he no longer loves either the Muses or his friends, but the one flowing copiously into his head charms him from bed, and the other keeps him in his bedroom snoring.
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§ 11.344 Anonymous on Metrodotus, one of the Veneti who had a Green Table Metrodotus, detesting the eternal burden of the Greens, has this table to keep him mindful of his hatred.
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§ 11.345 Anonymous Metrophanes, swan-faced, shock-headed, lovely stork, shaking your head this way and that like a crane's, you drag your long hood over the ground.
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§ 11.346 AUTOMEDON How long, Polycarpus, sitting to feast at an empty table, shall you live undetected on the savings of others? I no longer see you much in the marketplace, but you now turn up side streets and try to think where your feet shall carry you. You promise all, “Come, take yours tomorrow. Come and get it”; but not even if you take your oath do you continue to keep faith. “The wind bearing thee from Cyzicus brought thee to Samothrace ”; this is the goal that awaits you for the rest of your life.
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§ 11.347 PHILIPPUS Farewell ye whose eyes ever range over the universe, and ye thorn-gathering book-worms of Aristarchus' school. What serves it me to enquire what path the Sun has run, and whose son was Proteus and who Pygmalion? Let me know works whose lines are clean but let dark lore waste away the devotees of Callimachus.
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§ 11.348 ANTIPHANES O PARRICIDE, man more savage than the beasts all things hate thee, everywhere thy fate awaits thee. If thou fliest on the land, the wolf is near; and if thou climbest high on trees the asp on the branches is a terror. Thou makest trial of the Nile, too, but he nourishes in his eddies the crocodile, a brute most just to the impious.
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§ 11.349 PALLADAS Tell me whence comes it that thou measurest the Universe and the limits of the Earth, thou who bearest a little body made of a little earth? Count thyself first and know thyself, and then shalt thou count this infinite Earth. And if thou canst not reckon thy body's little store of clay, how canst thou know the measures of the immeasurable?
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§ 11.350 AGATHIAS SCHOLASTICUS On a Lawyer guilty of Malpractice Fool, how hast thou failed to notice the balance of Justice and dost not know the sentence due to impious men! Thou trustest in thy subtle rhetoric and thy trained mind, which knows how to utter a fallacious argument. Thou mayest hope if thou wilt, but the play of thy vain fancy cannot change Themis.
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§ 11.351 PALLADAS I let the cell yesterday to a barley-water maker, and today I found a formidable pugilist in it. And when I said, “Who art thou? Whence didst thou invade my house?” he up with his hands to box with me. I went off at the double, afraid of the savage man, on seeing the brewer suddenly turned into a bruiser. But by the boxer Pollux and Castor himself, and Zeus who hearkens to suppliants, keep the boxer, my aversion, off me; for I can't have a stand-up fight at the beginning of every month.
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§ 11.352 AGATHIAS SCHOLASTICUS Some one questioned the musician Androtion, skilled in what concerns the lyre, on a curious piece of instrumental lore. “When you set the highest string on the right in motion with the plectron, the lowest on the left quivers of its own accord with a slight twang, and is made to whisper reciprocally when its own highest string is struck; so that I marvel how nature made sympathetic to each other lifeless strings in a state of tension.” But he swore that Aristoxenus, with his admirable knowledge of plectra, did not know the theoretical explanation of this. “The solution,” he said, “is as follows. The strings are all made of sheep's gut dried all together. So they are sisters and sound together as if related, sharing each other's family voice. For they are all legitimate children, being the issue of one belly, and they inherit those reciprocal noises. Just so does the right eye, when injured, often convey its own pain to the left eye.”
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§ 11.353 PALLADAS Hermolycus' daughter slept with a great ape and she gave birth to many little ape-Hermeses. If Zeus, transformed into a swan, got him from Leda Helen, Castor, and Pollux, with Hermione at least a crow lay, and, poor woman, she gave birth to a Hermes -crowd of horrible demons.
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§ 11.354 AGATHIAS SCHOLASTICUS One enquired as follows about the soul from Nicostratus, that second Aristotle, that equal of Plato, the straw-splitter of the loftiest philosophy. “How should we describe the soul, as mortal or rather immortal? Must we call it a body or incorporeal? Is it to be classed among intelligible or apprehensible things, or is it both? ” But he perused again his books of metaphysic and Aristotle's work on the Soul, and having renewed his acquaintance with Plato's sublimity in the Phaedo, armed himself from every source with the complete truth. Then, wrapping his cloak about him and stroking down the end of his beard, he gave utterance to the solution: “If the soul has in truth any nature (for even that I don't know) it is in any case either mortal or immortal, either of a solid nature or immaterial; but when you have passed over Acheron, there you shall learn the precise truth like Plato. Or, if you will, imitate the boy Cleombrotus of Ambracia,! and let your body drop from the roof. Then you would at once recognise what you are, being without a body, and with nothing left you but the thing you are enquiring into.”
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§ 11.355 PALLADAS You say “I know all things,” but you are imperfect in all things. Tasting of everything, you have nothing that is your own.
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§ 11.356 Anonymous The book of Homer, which never lies, lied about thee, saying the minds of young men are volatile.
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§ 11.357 PALLADAS A son and father started a competitive contest as to which could eat up all the property by spending most, and after devouring absolutely all the money they have at last each other to eat up.
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§ 11.358 Anonymous Rufinianus was once Rufus in two syllables, but extended his syllables simultaneously with his crimes; but he does not escape the eye of two-syllabled Justice, for he shall again be called in two syllables Rufus the scoundrel and rascal, as he was before.
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§ 11.359 Anonymous THOU who art higher than all power, save my wretched self from all envy. Thou wouldest hear and I, too, would speak; for the wish gives birth to double pleasure, while elegance on the speaker's part and gravity on the hearer's bestow double beauty on the speech. Thou art the luminary of speech and of laws, judging by law and excelling in speech. I saw in this prince a cat -like gold-grabber or a cruel leech, a mass of bile set in gold.
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§ 11.360 Anonymous Now the general has become Hermanubis the dog, taking with him two brother Hermeses, stealers of silver, tied together with a rope, cold, prematurely dead demons of Tartarus. I know no place that accuses morals, but I say that morals accuse the place.
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§ 11.361 AUTOMEDON Two mules, equally advanced in years, adorn my carriage, in all things resembling Homer's Prayers: lame, wrinkled, with squinting eyes, the escort of Hephaestus, leathery demons who never tasted, I swear it by the Sun, even in a dream, either barley in summer or grass in spring. Therefore, as far as I am concerned, may you live as long as a crow or stag, feeding on empty air.
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§ 11.362 CALLIMACHUS Orestes of old, Leucarus, was happy in this, that, mad in other matters, he was not mad with my madness, nor did he have to apply the test to the Phocian, which is the trial of a friend, but taught him a part in one drama only. Perchance had he done this he would have lost his companion, and, as a fact, I no longer have most of my Pyladeses.
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§ 11.363 DIOSCORIDES Gone is the honour of the Alexandrians and Moschus, Ptolemaeus'3 son, has won glory among the young men in the torch-race, Moschus, Ptolemaeus' son! Woe for my city! And where are his mother's deeds of shame and her public prostitution? Where are the...? Where are the pigsties? Bring forth, ye whores, bring forth, persuaded by Moschus' crown.
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§ 11.364 BIANOR This man, a cypher, mean, yes a slave, this man look ye, is lord of some other's soul.
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§ 11.365 AGATHIAS SCHOLASTICUS Calligenes the husbandman, when he had cast the seed into the land, came to the house of Aristophanes the astrologer and begged him to tell him if he would have a favourable harvest and great abundance of corn. Taking his counters and spreading them on a tray, and bending his fingers, he said to Calligenes: “If your bit of land receives sufficient rain and produces no crop of wild flowers, if the frost does not break the furrows, if the hail does not nip off the tops of the sprouting ears, if no goat browses on the corn, and if it meet with no other injury by air or earth, I prophesy that your harvest will be excellent and you will cut the ears with success; only look out for the locusts.”
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§ 11.366 MACEDONIUS THE CONSUL A parsimonious man, laying hands on a treasure in a dream, wished to die enjoying a rich sleep. But when after the shadowy gain of the dream he awoke and saw his poverty as it was, he went to sleep again.
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§ 11.367 JULIAN ANTECESSOR You have a face just like an ostrich. Did Circe give you a potion to drink and change your nature into that of a bird?
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§ 11.368 JULIAN ANTECESSOR You have such a heavy crop on your hairy face that you ought to have it cut with scythes and not with scissors.
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§ 11.369 JULIAN ANTECESSOR To a Dwarf Live in safety in the town, lest the stork who delights in the blood of Pygmies peck you.
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§ 11.370 MACEDONIUS THE CONSUL The mirror does not speak, but I will expose you who daub your counterfeit beauty with rouge. Sweetlyred Pindar, too, once censuring this, said that “Water is best,” water the greatest enemy of rouge.
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§ 11.371 PALLADAS Do not invite me to witness your hunger-laden dishes, bringing me pumpkin pie to feast on. We don't eat the solid silver you set before us, defrauding with famine fare the poor trenchers. Seek those who are keeping their fast for your display of silver, and then you will be admired for your lightly loaded plate.
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§ 11.372 AGATHIAS SCHOLASTICUS As you have a body like a shadow, made of breath like the invisible wind, you should never venture to come near anyone, lest in drawing his breath he carry you into his nostrils, more feeble as you are than a breath of air. You have no fear of death, for then, without changing at all, you will again be just as you are, a ghost.
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§ 11.373 PALLADAS On a Poet playing at Dice Calliope is the goddess of all poets: your Calliope is called Tabliope.

Via ToposText (topostext.org), a project of the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation created by Brady Kiesling. Translated by William Roger Paton (1857-1921). Composed ca. 900 CE. Licence: public domain. Source.