The Alexandrians thronged to the festival full of enthusiasm, and shouted acclamations in Greek, and Egyptian, and some in Hebrew, charmed by the lovely spectacle.

Then he entered politics. But he abandoned that. The Eparch was an idiot; and those around him solemn-faced official blockheads.

He must be barely twenty-two years old— yet I’m certain that almost that many years ago I enjoyed the very same body.

Easy to guess what lies ahead: all of yesterday’s boredom.

Sometimes they speak to us in dreams; sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them.

He watches, deeply distressed, as they unload ships with booty taken from the Peloponnese.

No one of the others living his kind of life, no one of them gets paid what he gets paid.

The memory of his beauty deserves better.

Immoral to a degree—and probably more than a degree— they certainly were.

I wallow in the taverns and brothels of Beirut.

The pagans, lately so full of arrogance, now reticent and cowardly, quickly slink away from the procession.

He drinks and smokes, drinks and smokes; and he drags himself to the cafés all day long.

I grieve, O Christ, for my father even though he was—terrible as it is to say it— priest at that cursed Serapeion.

It was a knife in his heart, that dingy café where they used to go together.

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one.”

Art knows how to shape forms of Beauty, almost imperceptibly completing life, blending impressions, blending day with day.

I didn’t want to stay in Alexandria. Tamides left me; he went off with the Prefect’s son to earn himself a villa on the Nile, a mansion in the city.

I’m not in the least put out that my chariot wheel broke and I lost that silly race.

Overworked, tormented, given to cheap debauchery, he was soon used up.

The aging of my body and my beauty is a wound from a merciless knife.