Theatre of Sidon (400 A. D.)

Son of an honorable citizen—most important of all, a good-looking young man of the theatre, amiable in many ways. I sometimes write highly audacious verses in Greek and these I circulate—surreptitiously, of course. O gods, may those puritans who prattle about morals never see those verses about an exceptional kind of sexual pleasure, the kind that leads toward a condemned, a barren love.

Reprinted from C.P. CAVAFY: Collected Poems Revised Edition, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis. Translation copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton University Press. For reuse of these translations, please contact Princeton University Press. 
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