Shades of Callimachus

Coan ghosts of Philetas...

Today’s post translates an epigram by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus (poem 7.277 in the Palatine Anthology). In its intuition about identification and particularity in mourning, it recalls, in the brief scope its author favored, the slavewomen’s lament over Patroklos in Homer’s Iliad: “openly for Patroklos, but for her own sorrows each” (Lattimore tra…