Games of Venus: An Anthology of Greek and Roman Erotic Verse from Sappho to Ovid

by Peter Bing

Another kind of indirectness appears in 1341–1344. Up till now we have looked at requests or wooing speeches spoken directly to the beloved,42 but here we find the speaker talking about the boy: “I love a smooth skinned boy....” The boy has revealed to friends that he and the speaker are involved, and the speaker, though insisting that he's annoyed by this, says he'll put up with it, since the boy is “not unworthy.” Such a confession of love to a third party (apparently spoken to a peer or peers in a sympotic setting, though the audience is not specified) is itself a distinct kind of utterance. And the very next poem in the corpus, 1345–1350, is another example of this kind of utterance. Like 1283–1294 (see above), it contains a mythic exemplum, but here the exemplum is preceded by a brief gnome and followed by a reference to a personal situation: The speaker says, more or less: “Boy-love is fun. Zeus loved Ganymede. So don't be surprised, Simonides, if I, too, love a boy.”