And fills the welcome goblet for the guests;
While female hands, with many twinkling feet,
Lead their glad nightly dance; while many drops,
Daughters of these glad cups, great Bacchus' juice,
Fall with good omen on the cottabus dish.
75. But Archytas the Harmonist, as Chamæleon calls him, says that Alcman was the original poet of amatory songs, and that he was the first poet to introduce melodies inciting to lawless indulgence, . . . being, with respect to women. . . . On which account he says in one of his odes—
But Love again, so Venus wills,
Descends into my heart,
And with his gentle dew refreshes me.
He says also that he was in a moderate degree in love with Megalostrate, who was a poetess, and who was able to allure lovers to her by the charms of her conversation. And he speaks thus concerning her—
This gift, by the sweet Muse inspired,
That lovely damsel gave,
The golden-hair'd Megalostrate.
And Stesichorus, who was in no moderate degree given to amorous pursuits, composed many poems of this kind; which in ancient times were called [Greek: paidia] and [Greek: paidika]. And, in fact, there was such emulation about composing poems of this sort, and so far was any one from thinking lightly of the amatory poets, that Æschylus, who was a very great poet, and Sophocles, too, introduced the subject of the loves of men on the stage in their tragedies: the one describing the love of Achilles for Patroclus, and the other, in his Niobe, the mutual love of her sons (on which account some men have given an ill name to that tragedy); and all such passages as those are very agreeable to the spectators.
76. Ibycus, too, of Rhegium, speaks loudly as follows—
In early spring the gold Cydonian apples,
Water'd by streams from ever-flowing rivers,
Where the pure garden of the Virgins is,
And the young grapes, growing beneath the shade
Of ample branches, flourish and increase:
But Love, who never rests, gives me no shade,
Nor any recruiting dew; but like the wind,
Fierce rushing from the north, with rapid fire,
Urged on by Venus, with its maddening drought
Burns up my heart, and from my earliest youth,
Rules o'er my soul with fierce dominion.
