Time has been even less kind to Alcaeus than to his more famous countrywoman Sappho. I’ve been looking at him a little more closely recently.
Alcaeus Fragments 335 and 338. You will want to review your Lesbian Aeolic dialect.
Thanks Will; I think that’s the first time I’ve read Alcaeus, and both fragments are a lot of fun.
I learned a few new things, like about Psilosis for instance. Is this what I see happening sometimes in Homer, like with the name Hades? I think I’ve even seen it with an initial rho, which I thought couldn’t happen.
I don’t think I’ve ever attempted an actual translation, with readers of English in mind, but friends of mine own a wine store, where I work sometimes (which includes, if I take a day shift, reading Greek all day in between a few sales), and I think they would love these fragments, maybe even to put on the shelves somewhere.
I just made two initial attempts this morning. I’m not planning to include any of the Greek, so I wouldn’t mind taking some liberties, although I ignored metre and poetic style in favor of a basic paraphrase. In the first fragment, I’m thinking about removing the name Bychhis, and reading “my friend”, just to avoid confusion; although I feel a little guilty about it. 
I thought I would ignore the break in the second fragment, for ease.
335:
One must not hand over the heart to worries:
We will move forward unphased, my friend,
For it is the best of medicines
To fetch the wine and drink it freely.
338:
Zeus is raining down a great winter storm
From the sky, and the rivers have frozen.
But defy the storm! Put up a fire,
Mix unsparingly the honeysweet wine,
And throw a soft pillow to the side of your head.
Does the end of the second fragment simply indicate lying down to sleep, or does AUTAR perhaps suggest that you might need to cushion a headache?
And I can testify to frozen rivers and rain.
~N
Yep. Ionic was also psilotic, though that gets masked by orthorgraphy a lot of the time.
Does the end of the second fragment simply indicate lying down to sleep, or does AUTAR perhaps suggest that you might need to cushion a headache?
I don’t know enough about Lesbian furniture habits, but I was working on the assumption that they reclined during their parties, like the Athenians.
Ah, ok, I wasn’t thinking about that. For some reason, when I was reading it, I had the sense of a solitary evening; but of course the poem was sung for a gathering of friends.
Take a look at Horace Ode 9 from book I of the Odes (Ode 1.9). He uses Alcaeus fr. 338 as a guide to write his famous Ode, Mt. Soracte. In case you didn’t know.