The Song of Eros: Ancient Greek Love Poems

This title offers modern translations of timeless poems. This collection of modern translations of eighty poems provides a pleasant, thought-provoking reminder of love’s vagaries as captured through the wit, charm, and insight of the master poets of antiquity. All the emotions and experiences associated with love - rejection, infatuation, ecstasy, desperation, loneliness - are rendered accessible to contemporary readers through this lively, modern, yet faithful English translation of works that date from the seventh century B.C. to the sixth century A.D. Featured are selections from the more than four thousand epigrams that make up the Greek Anthology, a collection compiled in the tenth century by the Byzantine scholar Kephalas. Also included are works by the early iambic and elegiac poet Archilochos and the lyric poems of Sappho and Anakreon. The illustrations that accompany the poetry capture both the flavor of the age and the theme of the texts.