Browser versions of some fonts support more "special characters" than others. I've changed the font of my first message to Garamond (always so much tinier than Verdana, sigh), and the font of the second to Georgia. Does either of those help?
Are you seeing any Greek, Ann? Maybe it's just my long and short symbols that are getting garbled. Edited with simpler characters above, just in case.
By the way, here's some perhaps-helpful commentary by Regina Höschele, from her article "Meleager and Heliodora," published in
Plotting with Eros: Essays on the Poetics of Love and the Erotics of Reading, edited by Ingela Nilsson (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009):
Quote:
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The poet sees a bee touch Heliodora's skin and interprets this as a sign of love's bittersweetness, adding that he is not in need of the bee to understand the way things work--presumably because he has already experienced both aspects of erotic desire. Even though the message is indeed clear and in line with the traditional topos of love being bittersweet (γλυκύπικρος, glukúpikros, cf. Sappho 130.2 L-P), the image evoked by Meleager is rather unusual. The first distich, in which the bee is addressed, seems to suggest that the lover is worried lest Heliodora be stung[...]. [W]e might expect that the poet is going to analogize flower-like Heliodora to the blossoms of spring. Meleager, however, is moving in another direction by reading the union of insect and beloved as an emblem of Eros' bittersweetness. Yet he gives the conventional motif a witty twist by characterizing the sting itself as both sweet (γλυκύ, glukú) and bitter (πικρόν, pikrón), instead of associating the sweetness with the bee's honey-collecting activities. Flower-like Heliodora, for whose sake the bee has abandoned the blossoms of spring, turns out to be some sort of bee herself--accordingly Meleager should not so much be anxious about her well-being as about his own.
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Elsewhere in her article, Höschele quotes another of Meleager's poems in its entirety--it's a single distich (
AP 5.157 = 49 G-P):
Quote:
Τρηχὺς óνυξ ὑπ' Éρωτος ἀνέτραϕες Ἡλιοδώρας·
.....ταυτῆς γὰρ δύνει κνίσμα καὶ ἐς κραδίην.
Höschele's literal prose crib: (1) Harsh nail of Heliodora's, you must have been trained by Eros, (2) for her scratch penetrates my very heart.
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The G-P notes on that poem are of the opinion that "what is meant of course is not painful scratching, but pleasurable stimulation." Ooookay...