Eddis, Attolia, Sounis

In King of Attolia, Eugenides quotes some lyrics of Melinno to Costis (p. 346-7 US Hardback edition):

To you alone, Eldest,
the Fates have given unassailable rule.
Time alters all things,
except this one thing.
For you alone,
the wind that bellows the sails of rule
makes no shift.

I just discovered that Melinno's poem is in fact a genuine ancient lyric in our world. (I know I've posted fake Greek poetry here before, but this one is for reals. You can google it!)

We don't know anything about Melinno. We have no testimony about her, and only one poem, a hymn to Rome which is transmitted by a 5th century CE encyclopedist (Stobaeus). He claims that Melinno was from Lesbos, but he's probably guessing based on the fact that Melinno uses a meter associated with Sappho (but she writes in standard literary Doric, not in a Lesbian dialect). And since he thinks that it's a hymn to "strength" (ρώμη) rather than to Rome, it's not clear that we should trust him too far (and yet: obviously Melinno is playing with the idea of Rome = "strength"). We don't know when Melinno wrote: it might have been any time from the mid-third century BCE to the second-century CE.

So here are all of Melinno's stanzas behind the cut, followed by my translation (which is less lyrical than MWT's, but tries to preserve the meter of Sapphic strophe). ( Read more... )