About 160 lines of short love poems to a youth, kept in a single medieval manuscript. They open with a curse on Love: the Frenzies took you and nursed you, and you brought down Troy.
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Nearly fourteen hundred lines of Greek elegy have come down under the name of Theognis, a poet of Megara in the sixth century BC. Most of them give advice on friendship, politics and drinking to a young man called Cyrnus. The second book is different: short love poems to a boy, tender in one couplet and bitter in the next. It is being pressed now and can't be read here yet. Support it and it opens sooner.
Book 2 runs from line 1231 to line 1389 and survives in only one manuscript. Scholars doubt that much of it is by Theognis himself. It looks more like a gathering of love poems sung at drinking parties, by many hands over many years.
It opens on a curse: Cruel Love, the Frenzies took you and nursed you, and blames him for the fall of Troy and the ruin of heroes. A few lines later the poet turns to the boy himself and tells him to listen.
Making an interlinear Elegies, Book 2 is real work: freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Book 2 · the love poems gets made, and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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