the ancient pickup line that would probably work on me

Love stories from Greek and Roman myth and literature come in a few different sub-genres, and they’re all pretty toxic:

1. man wants to exploit woman for her knowledge/skills/access and covers it up with a thin veneer of romance for double the exploitation, double the fun (see: Jason and Medea, Theseus and Hippolyta, Theseus and Ariadne, Aeneas and Dido)

2. actually sort of hot, but built on a foundation of lies (Cupid and Psyche, Aphrodite and Anchises)

3. whoops, not a love story at all, definitely a rape story (Zeus and anyone, Apollo and almost anyone, Hades and Persephone in most versions)

4. this couple genuinely loves each other, so someone’s going to die a horrible, senseless death (Hector and Andromache, Apollo and Hyacinthus, Orpheus and Eurydice)

Nevertheless — in spite of the total lack of good models — tropes about mythic and epic romances abound in a way that I find kind of baffling. Take it from me, a person whose ex proposed with a quotation from the Odyssey that gets more and more problematic the more you look at it.

But there is one pickup line from antiquity that I think might have a decent chance of working on me.

No, it’s not from Ovid. I wrote an entire chapter in my book Not All Dead White Men about Ovid and pickup artists, excerpted here. The TL;DR is that Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, in spite of ostensibly being an ancient pickup artist manual, is pretty lacking in anything seductive. A big part of the problem there is that both Ovid and the modern pickup artist community have internalized the idea that women are inherently inferior, and the point of seduction is actually to raise your value as estimated by other men. Be still, my heart.

But there’s one line from ancient poetry that I find pretty sexy. It’s in Theocritus’ 11th Idyll, a poem written from the perspective of the cyclops Polyphemus in his youth, when he fell in love with the sea-nymph Galatea. The whole poem is delightful, both playful and clever in a way that is completely my jam.

Theocritus was writing in the early 3rd century BCE, and he spent some time in the Great Library of Alexandria (you know, the one people are still sad burned down). This period of poetry, the Hellenistic period, is a particularly rich and varied period, but some of the best-known works can be classified as, essentially, extremely highbrow fanfiction. Now, you can kind of say that about pretty much all Greek poetry, if you want to; Athenaeus actually quotes Aeschylus saying that his tragedies were “scraps from Homer’s feast.” Which sounds a lot like Alfred North Whitehead, millennia later, saying that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” The anxiety of influence is real.

But I’d like to think that we’re in a place now culturally where we know that while fanfiction can be formulaic, derivative, badly written, and cringe, it doesn’t have to be. A lot of great writers honed their craft writing fanfiction.

Theocritus 11 uses a formula that will be familiar to people who have read fanfiction: he takes a well-known story (the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey) and writes a prequel to it with a lot of knowing winks toward the original. Also, the idea of a teenaged cyclops in love is just pure gold. You can (and should) read the whole thing here, in translation by Diane Arnson Svarlien.

The sexiest part, in my opinion, is this part (11.30-7):

Delightful girl, I know why you run away.
My looks are frightening. I know it’s true,
One long shaggy eyebrow runs from ear to ear
With one huge eye below. My nose is flat
And wide. Yet, as I am, I keep a thousand head
Of cattle, and from them I fill a vat
Of the best milk to drink. All year round
I never run out of cheese, not even in
The coldest winter. My baskets are always full.

Enhance on that last bit:

τυρὸς δ᾽ οὐ λείπει μ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἐν θέρει οὔτ᾽ ἐν ὀπώρᾳ,
οὐ χειμῶνος ἄκρω: ταρσοὶ δ᾽ ὑπεραχθέες αἰεί.

cheese never leaves me, not in the summer nor the harvest
nor the depths of winter: my baskets always overflow.

HELL YES. Is there anything sexier than a man who promises to provide an infinite amount of cheese?

Hollywood thinks we want Brad Pitt in Troy, oiled up and ready to kill the hell out of some people. But I would argue that image is more attractive as an ideal for other men than it is to women. It’s a tired retread of the Ars Amatoria problem, where men are performing masculinity for each other and claiming that it’s making them more desirable to women. Pass. This SMBC sums up the issue perfectly.

Sure, there are women out there looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes. But I think most of us would rather have a self-aware, self-deprecating guy whose baskets overflow with cheese year-round.

Of course, Polyphemus’ pitch — and his desire in general — is the butt of the joke in this poem, because men under patriarchy have always been too incurious to actually pay attention to what women want.

It’s kind of funny that the poem with the best pickup line is fanfiction of the original text that my ex used to propose to me. It makes it seem like we weren’t that far off the mark. And maybe that’s true! We’re still good friends, and our partnership was mostly pretty great, even if it was doomed from the start by an overreliance on tired, misogynistic tropes about what a heterosexual partnership is supposed to look like. We might have had a chance if we’d been able to meet each other with more authenticity and vulnerability and tell each other what we really needed. Which, again, was cheese.

whoever had this at their wedding is definitely going the distance. Photo by The HK Photo Company on Unsplash