Mimnermus 1

 Mimnermus 1

1-5: What is life without golden Aphrodite? May I die when when I no longer care about secret love and sweet gifts and the bed, the flowers of youth.

6-10: When grievous old age comes (making a man shameful and ugly), cares rub him and he does not delight looking at the rays of the sun. He is hateful to boys and dishonored by women. So has god made old age.

• closing line with a summation of old age feels like an ending.
• another bleak poem preserved by Stobaeus, though the pleasures of love seem like something he might not love.
• line 2 τεθναίην pretty strong. The claim to want to die rather than suffer decline feels like a youthful one; reminds me of Achilles' own αὐτίκα τεθναίην in Il. 18
• line 3 (κρυπταδίη φιλότης καὶ μείλιχα δῶρα καὶ εὐνή) is I think the best bit of the poem. Love this mini-catalogue of love, which is suggestive of a world like new comedy and Latin love elegy: gift-giving, love in secret, and the occasional opportunity for the bed.

Plutarch agrees with me (kinda) about τεθναίην. He sees these lines as an example of "intemperance" (ἀκολασία) (on moral virtue 445e-f):

"... intemperance is a full-fledged vice. For intemperance possesses both an evil passion and an evil reason; under the influence of the former, it is incited by desire to shameful conduct; under the influence of the latter, which, since its judgement is evil, is enlisted with the desires, intemperance loses even the perception of its errors. But incontinence,a with the aid of reason, preserves its power of judgement intact, yet by its passions, which are stronger than its reason, it is swept along against its judgement. That is why incontinence differs from intemperance, for in it reason is worsted by passion, whereas with intemperance reason does not even fight...

So also the difference between them is not less manifest in their words than in their actions. These are, for instance, the sayings of intemperate persons:

What pleasure can there be, what joy, without
The golden Aphrodite? May I die
When things like these no longer comfort me."

link: https://www.loebclassics.com/view/plutarch-moralia_moral_virtue/1939/pb_LCL337.47.xml 

Interesting to see such a strong ethical judgment of the poem.