ἁ ξανθὰ Μεγαλοστράτα.
[Fr. 37.]
[33] The fragments which may with some confidence be assigned to these, probably early, poems, are 29 and 94. Besides this, the mention of Tantalus (87, to which belongs 100) may well have been introduced by the story of Ganymede; that of Niobe’s children (109) by the story of those loves of theirs of which Sophocles afterwards wrote. The expression ἐν Θεσσαλίῳ κλείτει (85) might well in such a poem have had reference to Apollo and Admetus, whose love is held up as a model, like that of the lovers in Theocritus xii. But most striking of all, perhaps, to the modern reader, is the feeling that prompts Alcman to speak of the Spartan girls as his “female boy-friends.” (καὶ Ἀλκμὰν τὰς ἐπεράστους κόρας ἀΐτας λέγει. Hypoth. ad Theocr. xii.)
[34] Aristides ii. p. 40, Dind.
[35] Cp. Fr. 26.
[36] Alcman seems somehow to speak of girls like an old man. To think of him so, renders far more natural the charming gallantry of his lines on Agido, or the ὑποκορισμός with which his maidens speak, or his confessions of how he likes his dinner served. One can think of those Spartan girls laughing at their old Lydian dancing-master, as they ran away down to the “baths of Eurotas,” while he went slowly home and made them immortal.
[37] Anyhow, not in primitive times. One must go a long way down the history of erotic poetry to find a “love-poet” who praises two ladies with such impartiality as Alcman does Agido and Agesichora.
[38] Cp. Reitzenstein, Epigramm und Skolion, p. 47 seqq.
[39] That the love thus generally recommended was purely sensual, goes without saying; the first two or three lines of the first fragment are proof enough of this.
In Fr. 1, l. 3, μείλιχα δῶρα is not very satisfactory, somehow. The passage in Hymn. Hom. x. 2, where the expression occurs again, is not quite parallel. In a less primitive poet, one would write without hesitation μείλιχ’ ἄδωρα. For this use of μείλιχα cp. Pind. Olymp. i. 49, and for the thought Anth. Pal. v. 29, &c., &c. Line 4 again might begin ἄνθε’ ἐπεί γ’ ἥβης.