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These are two short erotic epigrams on the love of boys preserved in the twelfth book of the Greek Anthology, where they appear under the name of Scythinus. They are traditionally ascribed to Scythinus of Teos, an iambic poet remembered for putting the teaching of Heraclitus into verse, though the identification is uncertain. In the first the poet is overwhelmed by the beauty of a boy of sixteen; the second is a frank and comic complaint about his own unruly body.
The epigrams belong to the collection of erotic poems on boys compiled by Strato of Sardis, and they show the wit and frankness of that tradition. Whoever their author was, they are small examples of the Greek epigram's mix of elevated phrasing and everyday speech.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Anthologia Graeca 12.22, 12.232). 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). The two pederastic epigrams (AP 12.22, 12.232) are headed 'Scythinus' in Strato's collection, and their identification with the Teian iambic poet is traditional but uncertain.