The volume gathers, in Francis Fawkes’s eighteenth-century Englishing, the surviving verse of three Greek poets: the drinking songs and love poems of Anacreon, the fragments and odes of Sappho, and the brief epic of Musæus on Hero and Leander. It is an expository edition rather than a bare translation—each poet is introduced by a short life, and the poems are followed by line-by-line notes drawing on the classical scholarship of the day. The book was printed in London in the early nineteenth century, and its apparatus makes clear that Fawkes saw himself as completing a task no English translator had yet attempted: a full version of the Teian bard.
The edition is arranged in three blocks, each with its own biography and commentary. Anacreon comes first, with his life, an introduction defending the translator’s method, the odes and epigrams, and notes on each; Sappho follows with her life, the odes, fragments, epigrams, and notes; Musæus closes the volume with an advertisement, “The Loves of Hero and Leander,” and notes. The notes are not decoration—they quote Madame Dacier, Barnes, Longepierre, Trapp, and a crowd of Greek and Latin authorities, and they argue, correct, and emend.
Fawkes’s Case Against His Predecessors
Fawkes’s introduction is a defence of the whole enterprise, and it is worth pausing on its claims before the poems themselves. He explains that many of the odes were turned into English years earlier at college, for amusement rather than publication, and that friends urged him to make a complete version. He is candid about his predecessors: John Addison’s translation is called incomplete and, apart from a few odes, harsh and crude; Cowley’s versions of Anacreon are said to bear no resemblance to the original, or at best a “caricatura,” a monstrous and distorted likeness. He is bolder still on Sappho, arguing that Phillips, whose translation Addison had praised in the Spectator, mistook the true sense and produced lines “amazingly rough and awkward.” The introduction also thanks an unnamed friend for revising the work and for translations of Moschus’s Idylliums marked D. The edition, in other words, presents itself as a correction of the English tradition as much as a transmission of the Greek.
The 1810 Fawkes Edition and Its Three Poets
The volume opens as a London book of 1810, printed by Whittingham and Rowland of Goswell Street and sold by Suttaby, Evance, and Hutchings in Stationers’ Court, with Sharpe and Hailes of Piccadilly and Taylor and Hessey of Fleet Street also carrying it. Francis Fawkes’s translation from the Greek arranges its contents in three blocks: Anacreon, with a life, an introduction, odes, epigrams and notes on each; Sappho, with a life, odes, notes, fragments, epigrams and further notes; and Musæus, with an advertisement, “The Loves of Hero and Leander,” and notes.
The Life of Anacreon
The biographical sketch places Anacreon’s birth at Teos, a seaport of Ionia. His parentage is uncertain, though his family is guessed to have been noble. Barnes dates the birth to the second year of the fifty-fifth Olympiad, near the start of Cyrus’s reign, the year 194 of Rome and 554 before Christ, which would make the poet about eighteen when Harpagus, Cyrus’s general, marched against the confederate Ionian and Æolian cities. Too weak to resist, the Teians abandoned their country rather than their liberty and moved to Abdera in Thrace, where the jealous Thracians soon troubled them; Anacreon probably lost friends in these conflicts and laments them in some epigrams. Few particulars of his life survive because he despised business, giving all his hours to wine, love and the muse. He joined the court of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, then among the gayest and most flourishing cities of Asia, and Polycrates honoured him with friendship and secret counsel. Herodotus confirms that Anacreon was in the prince’s chamber when a message arrived from Oretes, governor of Sardis, whose treachery soon after betrayed and crucified Polycrates.
Athens, Teos, and the Grape-Stone
Shortly before that disaster, Hipparchus, eldest son of Pisistratus, invited Anacreon to Athens, sending obliging letters and a fifty-oared vessel to carry him across the Aegean. Plato calls him “the wise Anacreon,” the foundation of Fontenelle’s dialogue in which Anacreon and Aristotle dispute the prize of wisdom and the poet takes it. After Hipparchus was assassinated, Anacreon returned to Teos, which the Teians had been allowed to reinhabit after Cyrus’s death, and stayed until another commotion forced him to Abdera, where he died in his eighty-fifth year, choked by a grape-stone while regaling on new wine—a death Cowley made the subject of an elegy. Only a small part of his work survived; besides odes and epigrams he composed elegies, hymns and iambics, and some credit him with inventing the lyre. Horace honours him; Madame Dacier praises his imitation of nature and his following of reason; Rapin calls his odes flowers, beauties and perpetual graces. The life closes with Antipater’s epitaph, quoted from the Spectator, and a stanza from Akenside’s ode on lyric poetry.
The Translator’s Introduction
Fawkes explains that many of the odes were turned into English years earlier at college for amusement, not for publication. Encouraged by friends, and permitted to insert elegant versions by the late Dr. Broome—printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine under the name Charles Chester, M.D.—and a few by other hands (Odes 2, 13, 45, 49 and 51), he resolved to give an entire version of the Teian bard, which no one in England had yet done. John Addison’s translation he calls incomplete and, apart from a few odes, harsh and crude; West’s remark on Cowley’s Pindar is applied to Cowley’s Anacreon, which bears no resemblance to the author, or only a caricature, a monstrous and distorted likeness. Attempting Sappho is judged bold given Addison’s praises in the Spectator of Phillips’s versions of her two odes, but Phillips mistook the true sense, and the opening lines (“Bless’d as the’ immortal gods is he…”) are amazingly rough and awkward—unpoetical expressions that should not have escaped so accurate a critic unless friendship biased his judgment. It is equally surprising that the Idylliums of Bion and Moschus, charming in the Greek, have scarce ever been attempted in English; the translator claims merit for making these elegant writers speak his native language, and thanks an unnamed friend, whose name would honour the title page, for revising and correcting the work and for excellent translations of Moschus’s Idylliums marked D.
The First Odes: The Lyre, Women, and Drinking
The odes open with a quotation from “The Progress of Poetry, By a Lady.” In the first, “On His Lyre,” the poet bids the lyre celebrate the brother-kings, the sons of Atreus, Cadmus and the Theban war, but the chords rebel and warble only strains of love; he tries again for Hercules and they answer only love, so he bids farewell to heroes and kings—love alone shall tune his strings. The second ode, “By Another Hand,” on women, argues that nature arms every creature: jaws to the lion, horns to the bull, hoofs to the horse, feet to the hare, wings to birds, fins to fish, mind to man; to woman she gives beauty, which need not fear sword, flame or spear, being stronger than all—man himself included. A fragment of the eighteenth ode prays that Love meet the meek-eyed graces without armour amid young grapes promising wine; a polished plain shows beauteous boys at play, but no Apollo. The nineteenth, “We Ought to Drink,” runs through the thirst of the world: the earth sucks up the showers poured by Aquarius’s urn, trees imbibe the earth’s juice, the sea drinks all rain and rivers, the sun thirsts and drains sea, rivers and rain, and nightly the moon drinks up the sun; why, the speaker asks, should all things drink but he?
Broome’s Odes: The Mistress, Summer, and the Bower
Dr. Broome’s twentieth ode, “To His Mistress,” has the gods prove their sway by transforming mortals—Niobe stands an image, Philomel sings through the air—while the speaker wishes to be his mistress’s mirror so she would always gaze on him and his naked heart would show her herself, “for thou art there”; or her folding vest clasped to her breast; or a fountain laving her naked beauties; or the cincture warming “those little hills of snow”; or her ointment wandering over her limbs; or her pearl chain embracing her neck; or a sandal to be trodden on. The twenty-first, “Summer,” calls for the foaming bowl, since the heat of day has drunk his life away; he asks to be led to cooling bowers with fresher wreaths, the present ones scorching and fading, and finds that neither winds nor shades can remove the heat of love, “the fever of the mind.” E. B. Greene’s twenty-second, “The Bower,” invites Chloe to recline beneath the genial shade, shielded from rude winds, where the balmy breeze fans the trees and streams whisper the voice of love where persuasion holds her court; passers-by in the grove must feel his bliss and admire.
Riches, Enjoyment, and the Transports of Wine
The twenty-third, “The Vanity of Riches,” reasons that if treasured gold could prolong life he would keep and spare it, telling death at last to “take thy fee, and walk away”; since riches cannot save mortals from the grave, why deceive himself? Death comes whether one is rich or not; give him generous wines, soothing joys, kind beauty and sincere friends while he lives. The twenty-fourth, “Enjoyment,” takes his being as but a span, life a march and journey he must make; the past he knows, the future none can tell; he dismisses teasing care and, before death and dust, will spend every moment in revelry, laughing, singing and dancing with young Lyceus. The twenty-fifth, “Wine Banishes Cares,” has Bacchus cheering his breast and lulling cares; griefs and toils are dismissed, since no solicitude saves mortals from the grave; let them quaff the juice Bacchus gave. The twenty-sixth, “The Transports of Wine,” makes him rich as Lydia’s king when Bacchus fills his breast; he sings catches, wears unfading ivy-wreaths and laughs at the farce of state; others delight in fighting fields, but Bacchus yields nobler transports—better to lie drunk than dead. The twenty-seventh, “The Praise of Bacchus,” has him dance with feathered feet, feel divine transports in sparkling wine, and be charmed by music, song and beauty as he dances the hours away.
Two Portraits: The Mistress and Bathyllus
The twenty-eighth, “His Mistress’s Picture,” from the Guardian, asks the best of painters to paint his mistress’s charms as described, since the painter could not have seen them: her soft black hair breathing odours, an ivory forehead beneath flowing jet, sable brows in two arches nearly meeting; an eye that must sparkle, languish and desire, killing like Pallas, melting like Venus; rosy cheeks amid new-fallen snow; lips wearing persuasion, blushing and inviting love; the polished neck and swelling bosom; the rest veiled in purple garments, her body but not her shape concealed—and when the work is done, “the breathing paint will speak anon.” The twenty-ninth, “Bathyllus,” tells the artisan to paint the well-proportioned man, Bathyllus young and fair, with soft black tresses whose auburn curled extremes glow like solar beams and fall artlessly; a cerulean brow gracing a snow-white forehead; eyes glowing with fire that inspires gentle love, taking mien from Mars and softness from the Idalian queen, giving hope and terror; cheeks crowned with roses and the peach’s dubious down, with ingenuous blush; lips where persuasion dwells, seeming silently to speak; an ivory neck with Adonis’s charms; the bosom and Mercury’s hands—the artist must finish the rest himself. The speaker will pay the price, since the picture seems to live; gold is too little, for the picture is the pride of Greece; he offers the divine Apollo and bids the painter make Bathyllus from him: when at Samos, ask for young Bathyllus, and from Bathyllus draw Phoebus.
Cupid Captive, the Pleasing Frenzy, and the Rose
The thirtieth, “Cupid Taken Prisoner,” has the muses find Cupid and bind him with wreaths of roses, bringing him to blooming beauty; Venus strives to ransom him, but Love refuses to be free and will remain with beauty in his rosy chain. The thirty-first, “The Pleasing Frenzy,” bids the Stoics keep their precepts to the schools and indulge him with the bowl, for he will be nobly mad with wine; Alcmason and Orestes grew mad when they slew their mothers, but he has killed no man. The passage breaks off mid-ode with a youth who, through wine, pursues love in groves; he finds a maid asleep on beds of roses, presses her hand, vows, and declares he will die if she refuses; her tongue denies him, and he then storms the unwilling-willing fair, blessing the grapes that gave him happy impudence. Dr. Broome’s fifty-second ode, “The Rose,”
The Annotated Odes: Thebes, Orion, and the Archer’s Eye
The editorial notes open by unpacking the allusions buried in Anacreon’s odes. In the sixteenth ode, the first line glances at the war of the seven captains against Thebes—the quarrel that arose when Eteocles, son of Oedipus and Jocasta, refused his brother Polynices the share of government they had agreed to alternate year by year after their father’s death; Aeschylus made a tragedy of it. The third verse drew an imitation from Ovid, quoted in Latin and English, and the ninth calls the eyes the archers of Jove, a fancy matched by an epigram from the Anthologia in which an “insidious archer” lurks in Zenophelia’s eye.
The seventeenth ode, we are told, was quoted by Gellius, who heard it sung and played at an entertainment he attended. Its ninth verse alludes to the constellations Vulcan wrought on Achilles’ shield in the eighteenth Iliad, quoted from Pope; the tenth calls Orion “odious” because he foretells tempests and terrifies mariners, and Horace’s infestus is produced alongside a translation. In the eighteenth ode the poet sets Love among the Graces after naming Venus—a sign, the editor says, that beauty alone may please but cannot long hold the heart without other charms. The twenty-third verse asks that Apollo not be painted on the bowl, since the god unfortunately killed his favourite Hyacinthus at quoits.
Emendations, Niobe, and the Thracian Draught
The nineteenth ode gives the editor room to play textual critic. The original reads “The sea drinks up the air,” and every commentator is silent except Dr. Trapp, who confesses he did not understand it. The editor ventures an emendation to “The sea drinks up the rivers,” citing the seventh ode, Moschus, and Tioelzinus on Apollonius Rhodius, and claims the sense is now full and complete; the moon, in the tenth verse, drinks up the sun because she borrows her light from him.
The twentieth ode prompts the tale of Niobe, daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion, who boasted six sons and six daughters and preferred herself to Latona, whereupon Apollo and Diana slew all her children in a day and grief struck her dumb, so the poets feigned her turned to stone. Ovid tells it in the sixth book of the Metamorphoses, but perhaps better through Pope’s Iliad, where Achilles speaks to Priam; two Greek epigrams follow, and the editor notes that this gallant original was copied by several masters, among them Dionysius the sophist, who wished himself a breeze, a rose, a lily.
The twenty-first ode turns on the Greek amystis, which Madame Dacier explains as a Thracian manner of drinking—swallowing a quantity of liquor without drawing breath or shutting the mouth—noticed by Horace and rendered by Duncombe. The poet’s reflection that once love possesses the heart all outward remedies are useless is judged exceedingly natural, beautiful, and strong, agreeing with the close of the fourteenth ode. The twenty-second, addressed by Anacreon to Bathyllus, the translator with more decency applied to a lady; its “fountain rolling Persuasion” is called the most delicate and poetical of phrases, and Longepierre supplies an epigram in which Pan himself speaks.
The Wretched Taste of Faber and the Sleepless Talent
The twenty-third ode provokes open exasperation: one cannot but wonder at the wretched taste of Faber, who rejected it as spurious when it is perhaps not inferior in beauty to the best of them—Barnes and Trapp having amply proved its genuineness by explaining a Greek idiom. Its third and fourth verses glance at a story Stobaeus tells: Anacreon, having received five talents of gold from Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, was so beset by cares about his treasure that he could not sleep for two nights, and sent the present back, apologizing that however valuable the sum, it was not a sufficient price for the trouble and anxiety of keeping it.
The twenty-fourth ode gathers parallels: Tibullus bidding cares and labours depart, a distich of Macedonius, and Julian’s epitaph in which Anacreon repeats after death the lesson “Drink, mortals, ere you die.” The twenty-fifth opens with Horace, and the notes then turn to the wounded Cupid who runs to his mother Venus; she smiles and tells him that he too is little like a bee, yet makes mighty wounds. Madame Dacier explains that Anacreon makes Cupid speak so because pagan theology held the gods’ language differed from men’s; Longepierre objects that such learning only obscures a passage more naturally read as an infant, having heard of serpent stings, taking the creature that stung him for a serpent, while the labourers called it a bee.
Grasshoppers, Roses, and the Rules of the Bowl
The later odes are annotated in a steady stream of cross-reference. The forty-first finds Tibullus saying the same, Madame Dacier supposing a passage founded the opinion that the Graces were daughters of Bacchus and Venus, and Macedonius crediting Anacreon with the precept of banishing care; Rufinus and Martial attest that he is not singular in urging enjoyment from life’s brevity. The forty-second, through the poet’s seventh epigram, shows his contempt for conversation over the bottle that turns on wars and blood, preferring wit refined with Venus and the Graces—tranquillity being life’s happiest ingredient. The forty-third explains that dew nourishes grasshoppers, that Greek poets call them musical, and that Aelian, writing against those who eat them, says they offend the Muses, daughters of Jupiter; the Athenians called themselves grasshoppers and wore little gold ones in their hair as badges of honour and memorials that they were born of the earth. Homer’s gods, wounded Venus among them, are shown free from blood.
Madame Dacier praises the forty-fourth as one of the finest and most gallant odes of antiquity; the forty-fifth delighted Mons. Le Fevre, whose exclamation John Addison translated, and its Lemnos—the Aegean island sacred to Vulcan, who recounts in the first Iliad how Jupiter threw him down onto it—is glossed along with Horace’s “nectar of Venus” and a sentiment akin to Moschus on the danger of Cupid’s darts. Propertius and Ovid are cited against noble birth and gold in the forty-sixth; Guarini, translated by Addison, in the forty-seventh; the casting of a die for the master of revels, from Horace, in the forty-eighth. The forty-ninth recalls the image of peace on Achilles’ shield; the fiftieth Homer’s Helen mixing a bowl; the fifty-first the Anthologia’s epigrams on Venus rising from the sea, with Garth and Tickell quoted. The fifty-second draws on Homer’s vintage and Pope’s rendering of it.
The fifty-third celebrates a rose and asks a lyrist to play to its voice. The rose was consecrated to the Muses, sung in Anacreon’s fifth ode, in a fragment of Sappho, and in Ausonius; “rosy-fingered” is a frequent Homeric epithet for morning, Dryden used it, and Milton’s morning description is beautiful. Roses served in medicine and in embalming—Venus anoints Hector’s body with them—and crowned the tombs of friends; nothing dried keeps its fragrance longer, and Bion says the blood of Adonis gave the rose birth. Cybeba in the fifty-fourth seems the name of a female attendant, taken from Cybele, mother of the gods; the tiara of the fifty-fifth is a head ornament like the modern turban, with Addison quoting Dionysius on the Parthians. The fifty-sixth is owed to Henry Stephens and extant in Stobaeus, who acknowledges it as Anacreon’s, with Theocritus on old age and Horace, Catullus’s Lesbia and her sparrow, and Moschus on Bion’s death brought in. The fifty-seventh notes that the ancients drank wine mixed with water—Hesiod prescribing three measures of water to one of wine in summer—and that the Scythians were remarkable for intemperance and quarrelling over cups. The fifty-eighth survives in the Anthologia, ascribed to Julian, a king of Egypt, and is kept for its beauty; the fifty-ninth was imitated by Horace.
The Closing Epigrams and the Life of Sappho
The epigrams close with an epitaph: the mortal part is given to dust for the sake of dear children and native land, but the subject’s fame shall live in triumph over the grave. Addison likens the fourteenth epigram to Hermia’s speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of two artificial gods creating one flower on one sampler and growing together like a double cherry, “two lovely berries molded on one stem.” The eighteenth notes that the ancients esteemed Mercury the general protector of learning, placing his statue in libraries and porticoes before the schools; the nineteenth is thought not Anacreon’s, Barnes notwithstanding, because its mention of Sophocles is too repugnant to chronology.
Then comes the life of Sappho, native of Mitylene in Lesbos. Her father is uncertain, with no fewer than eight claimants, though all agree Cleis was her mother. Suidas places her in the forty-fifth Olympiad, Eusebius in the forty-fourth, about six hundred years before Christ; she was contemporary with Pittacus, the tyrant of Mitylene, and with Stesichorus and Alcaeus. Barnes tried to prove from Chamaeleon and Hermesianax that Anacreon was one of her lovers, but the amour is generally judged too repugnant to chronology and admitted only as poetical fiction. She married Cercolas, a man of great wealth and power in Andros, and bore a daughter named Cleis. Widowed young, she renounced a second marriage but not the pleasures of love, her passion too violent, the ancients say, to be restrained even to one sex. No one was so much her admiration as the accomplished Phaon, a young man of Lesbos said to have been a kind of ferryman, fabled to have carried Venus over the stream and received as reward the gift of becoming the most beautiful of men. She fell desperately in love and sailed to Sicily in pursuit of him, he having withdrawn there to avoid her; in that island and on that occasion she composed her “Hymn to Venus.” The poem was ineffectual, Phaon obdurate, and she resolved to be rid of her passion at any rate. A promontory in Acarnania called Leucate held a little temple of Apollo, where despairing lovers made secret vows and flung themselves into the sea, an established opinion holding that all taken up alive were immediately cured of their former passion. Sappho tried the remedy and perished in the experiment; the origin of this unaccountable humour is unknown. Ovid represents her as advised by the vision of a sea-nymph, of which she sent an account to the cruel Phaon, in verses given in Pope’s translation. The Romans erected a noble porphyry statue to her memory; the Mitylenians paid her sovereign honours after death and coined money with her head. Her person is best conceived from her own description in Ovid. To collect the ancients’ opinion of her works would fill a volume; she was honoured with the title “the tenth Muse,” and Horace is quoted in Duncombe’s translation.
The Poet, the Scholar, and the Note
What distinguishes this volume from a plain anthology is the way it keeps two voices in play. There is the poet’s voice—Anacreon bidding his lyre sing of love rather than war, Sappho’s fragments of longing, Musæus’s Leander swimming toward a torch—and there is the scholar’s voice, patient and often pedantic, explaining that the Greek word for drinking without drawing breath was amystis, that the drachm offered for a dove was about sevenpence halfpenny, that the sea “drinks up the rivers” and not the air, whatever the manuscripts say. The notes are where the edition’s real character lives. They quote Stobaeus on Anacreon returning five talents of gold to Polycrates because the anxiety of keeping it cost him two nights’ sleep; they cite Aelian on a crow that carried King Marrhes’s letters faster than any messenger; they argue that the mention of Sophocles in one epigram is too repugnant to chronology for the poem to be genuine. The effect is a book that reads its own poems aloud and then, in the margin, tells you what the ancients thought of them.
Anacreon’s World and Its Discontents
The life of Anacreon sets the tone for everything that follows. Born at Teos, a sea-port of Ionia, he is a poet who despised business; wine, love, and the muse disposed of all his hours. He moves from the court of Polycrates of Samos—where Herodotus places him in the chamber when the tyrant received the treacherous message from Oretes—to Athens at the invitation of Hipparchus, who sent a fifty-oared vessel to fetch him across the Aegean. Plato calls him “the wise Anacreon,” and Fontenelle built a dialogue on the rivalry between Anacreon and Aristotle for the prize of wisdom, awarded to the poet. He dies, in the tradition the book repeats, choked by a grape-stone in his eighty-fifth year, a death Cowley made the subject of an elegy.
The odes themselves circle a small set of concerns with remarkable persistence. Drink is the answer to mortality: the earth drinks, the trees drink, the sea drinks, the sun drinks, so why should man abstain. Love is a fever of the mind, a wound in the liver, a god who hides under a rose and is swallowed in wine. Old age is the one enemy that cannot be drunk away—Ode LVI, in Broome’s translation, looks at the grave and says that once fate closes the eyes, man “dies—for ever, ever dies.” The notes are alert to the pattern: the editor observes that the reflection in Ode XXI, that once love possesses the heart no exterior remedy will avail, agrees with the conclusion of the fourteenth ode. Anacreon’s world is narrow, but the edition shows it to be coherent.
Sappho, Phaon, and the Leap from Leucate
The life of Sappho is the volume’s most dramatic piece of prose. A native of Mitylene in Lesbos, she flourishes around the time of Pittacus and Alcaeus; she marries Cercolas of Andros, bears a daughter named Cleis, and is left a widow young. Barnes tried to prove from Chamaeleon and Hermesianax that Anacreon was one of her lovers, but the book treats the amour as chronologically impossible and admits it only as poetical fiction. Her passion for Phaon, the Lesbian ferryman whom Venus rewarded with extraordinary beauty, drives her to Sicily in pursuit of him; there she composes the Hymn to Venus, which fails to move him. She resolves to cure herself by the established remedy—leaping from the promontory of Leucate in Acarnania, where a temple of Apollo stood and despairing lovers threw themselves into the sea, believing that any taken up alive would be cured of their former passion. Sappho tried the remedy and perished in the experiment.
The book is careful with her reputation. It records that the Mitylenians paid her sovereign honours after death and coined money with her head, that the Romans erected a porphyry statue to her, that she was called the tenth Muse. It also quotes Addison’s judicious observation in the Spectator that he does not know whether the loss of her writings is not for the benefit of mankind, since they were filled with such bewitching tenderness that it might have been dangerous to give them a reading. What survives is small—a Hymn to Venus, an ode preserved by Longinus and acknowledged imperfect, two epigrams, and fragments—but the edition treats the fragments as precious, and Addison’s comparison of Sappho to Cacus, breathing nothing but flame, is quoted with approval.
Hero, Leander, and the Torch in the Tower
The volume closes with Musæus’s “Loves of Hero and Leander,” and the poem’s machinery is worth describing because the edition’s notes return to it. Hero is a priestess of Venus at Sestos, of illustrious birth, dwelling in a high sequestered tower on the ramparts above the flood, chaste and shunning the night dances to screen her beauty from envy. At the annual festival of Venus and Adonis, Leander of Abydos sees her and is seized by love; he wins her by persuasion in the temple’s last recess, and they arrange that she will hang a torch from her turret to guide him as he swims the Hellespont each night. The poem follows the ritual of their meetings—his undressing on the shore, the torch kept in view, himself “pilot, passenger, and bark”—and then the winter, when the winds rage and the torch of death glimmers instead of love’s harbinger. The edition’s notes on the poem are lighter than those on Anacreon, but the closing movement is the same: the scholar steps back, and the story is left to speak.
What the Edition Leaves Behind
The book’s significance is partly historical and partly temperamental. Historically, it is a document of eighteenth-century classical reception: Fawkes’s quarrel with Cowley and Phillips, his reliance on Madame Dacier and Barnes, his willingness to emend a Greek text on the strength of a parallel in Moschus, all belong to a moment when English readers wanted their Greek poets complete and annotated. Temperamentally, the volume is a defence of lightness. Anacreon’s odes are flowers, beauties, and perpetual graces, as Rapin called them; Sappho’s fragments are the tenth Muse’s relics; Musæus’s poem is a night-piece of love and storm. The edition takes these small things seriously enough to argue over a drachm and a dialect, and in doing so it makes a case that the minor Greek poets are not minor at all.
