"My licit lover and I want two pair of hose
"to buy---two style that we are told you make,
"both gold: mine sheer and doubly woven at the toes
"and heels, preventing snags; but his, fully opaque."
Author's Notes/Comments:
The original Greek epigram is presented in the scholarly periodical, Le Journal, February, 1896 (in the same article from which the poet Cavafy derived the material for his subsequently discarded poem about Salome).
According to the article, this epigram was first cited by Hieronymus Scholasticus in his voluminous Historia Ecclesiastica, in which he records that it appeared on a scrap of papyrus found, ostensibly, in the ruins of a silk merchant's house, and believed to have been written by a Christian girl (hence, her specification that her lover is licit, that is, wedded to her). In his commentary on the epigram, Hieronymus Scholasticus interprets it as evidence of the licit marital pleasures that Christians, then, enjoyed without fear of fundamentalist reprisal.
