Endymion Ashamed

Bernard Picart, "The Moon and Endymion," 1731. In the public domain, free for noncommercial use. 

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The shame of Endymion is the theme of epigram 58 of Book VI of the Greek Anthology. The poem is attributed to Isidorus Scholasticus of Bolbytine. According to Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (from the Digital Collections for the University of Michigan Library), Isidorus was “of the town of Bolbotine, in the Delta of Egypt” and was “the author of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology.”

I find it both mystical and amusing to accidentally choose, as an item of interest, a short poem by an otherwise unknown author. It’s as if, a thousand years from now, someone will come across a pedestrian four-line poem of mine in a tattered anthology and translate it into Martian (or whatever is being spoken).

The original is a four-line dedicatory epigram; like nearly all classical Greek and Latin poetry, it does not rhyme. In W.R. Paton’s Loeb edition, it is Englished as follows: “Thy friend Endymion, O Moon, dedicates to thee, ashamed, his bed that survives in vain and its futile cover; for grey hair reigns over his whole head and no trace of his former beauty is left.” My rhyming version:

O moon, your friend Endymion
gives you his useless bed.
He is ashamed of the gray that covers his head,
his beauty in ruin.
 
 
Posted 9 July 2024. Please send comments to [email protected].