Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Eros Drapeta
Love is on the loose in Eros Drapeta (The Runaway Love), a playful short poem by Moschus, the Ancient Greek bucolic poet of Syracuse who wrote in the second century BC. Aphrodite cries her missing son like a runaway slave, describing his fiery eyes, honeyed voice, and treacherous archery, and warning that whoever catches him will get no safe reward.
The little poem is a gem of Hellenistic wit, turning divine mythology into a mock proclamation, and its portrait of dangerous Cupid echoed through later Greek, Latin, and Renaissance love poetry. It shows the lighter register of the bucolic tradition founded by Theocritus.
About this edition. The Greek text is that of the Perseus Digital Library. Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).