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From Specimens of the Poets and Poetry of Greece and Rome by Various Translators, edited by William Peter, A. M. of Christ-church, Oxford; Philadelphia: Carey and Hart; 1847; p. 38.
[38]
ALCMAN OR ALCMÆON
[About 680 B. C.]
ALCMAN is said to have been born at Sardis, and numbered amongst the fathers of lyric poetry. His Parthenia, composed in praise of women, and sung by chorusses of virgins, were very popular amongst the Spartans, and procured for him the title of �������� — the sweet. Nothing but a few scattered sentences, and disjointed lines — affording the most inadequate materials for any judgment of his merits — have come down to us.
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MEGALOSTRATA.
Translated by J. H. Merivale
AGAIN sweet Love, by Venus led,
Hath all my soul possess’d;
Again delicious rapture shed
In torrents o’er my breast.
Now Megalostrata, the fair, —
Of all the virgin train
Most blessed — with her yellow hair —
Hath brought me to the Muse’s fane.
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FRAGMENT.
Translated by Thomas Campbell
THE mountain summits sleep, glens, cliffs, and caves,
Are silent; — all the black earth’s reptile brood,
The bees, the wild beasts of the mountain wood,
In depths beneath the dark red oceans? waves
It’s monsters rest; whilst, wrapt in bower and spray,
Each bird is hush’d, that stretch’d its pinions[pinions =
wings] to the day.
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