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and they ponder the luck of Herodes—
what other sophist was honored like this?—
whatever he wants and whatever he does
the Greeks (the Greeks!) follow him,
neither to criticize nor to debate,
nor even to choose any more; just to follow.
[1900; 1911; 1912]
Sculptor from Tyana
As you will have heard, I’m no beginner.
Lots of stone has passed between my hands.
And in Tyana, my native land,
they know me well. And here the senators
commission many statues.
Let me show
a few to you right now. Notice this Rhea;
august, all fortitude, quite archaic.
Notice the Pompey. The Marius,
the Aemilius Paullus, and the African Scipio.
The likenesses, as much as I was able, are true.
The Patroclus (I’ll touch him up soon).
Near those pieces of yellowish
marble there, that’s Caesarion.
And for some time now I’ve been involved
in making a Poseidon. Most of all
I’m studying his horses: how to mold them.
They must be rendered so delicately that
it will be clear from their bodies, their feet,
that they aren’t treading earth, but racing on water.
But this work here is my favorite of all,
which I made with the greatest care and deep feeling:
him, one warm day in summer
when my thoughts were ascending to ideal things,
him I stood dreaming here, the young Hermes.
[1893; 1903; 1911]
The Tomb of Lysias the Grammarian
Just there, on the right as you go in,
in the Beirut library we buried him:
the scholar Lysias, a grammarian.
The location suits him beautifully.
We put him near the things that he
remembers maybe even there—glosses, texts,
apparatuses, variants, the multivolume works
of scholarship on Greek idiom. Also, like this,
his tomb will be seen and honored by us
as we pass by on our way to the books.
[1911; 1914]
Tomb of Eurion
Inside of this elaborate memorial,
made entirely of syenite stone,
which so many violets, so many lilies adorn,
Eurion lies buried, so beautiful.
A boy of twenty-five, an Alexandrian.
Through the father’s kin, old Macedonian;
a line of alabarchs on his mother’s side.
With Aristoclitus he took his philosophical instruction;
rhetoric with Parus. A student in Thebes, he read
the sacred writings. He wrote a history
of the Arsinoïte district. This at least will endure.
Nevertheless we’ve lost what was most dear: his beauty,
which was like an Apollonian vision.
[1912; 1914]
That Is He
Unknown, the Edessene—a stranger here in Antioch—
writes a lot. And there, at last, the final canto has
appeared. Altogether that makes eighty-three
poems in all. But the poet is worn out
from so much writing, so much versifying,
the terrific strain of so much Greek phrasing,
and every little thing now weighs him down.
A sudden thought, however, pulls him out
of his dejection—the exquisite “That is he”
which Lucian once heard in a dream.
[1898; 1909]
Dangerous
Said Myrtias (a Syrian student
in Alexandria; during the reign
of the augustus Constans and the augustus Constantius;
partly pagan, and partly Christianized):
“Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body I will give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all, for whenever I will—
and I will have the will, strengthened
as I’ll be with contemplation and study—
at the crucial moments I’ll recover
my spirit as it was before: ascetic.”
[?; 1911]
Manuel Comnenus
The emperor Lord Manuel Comnenus
one melancholy morning in September
sensed that death was near. The court astrologers
(those who were paid) were nattering on
that he had many years left yet to live.
But while they went on talking, the king
recalls neglected habits of piety,
and from the monastery cells he orders
ecclesiastical vestments to be brought,
