Palladas

All that is known about Palladas has been deduced from his 151 epigrams preserved in the Greek Anthology (Anthologia graeca); another twenty-three appear in that collection under his name, but his authorship is suspect.

One of the epigrams attributed to him on the authority of Maximus Planudes is a eulogy on the celebrated Hypatia, daughter of Theon of Alexandria, whose death took place in 415.

Another was, according to a scholium in the Palatine Manuscript (the most important source for our knowledge of Greek epigram), written in the reign of the joint emperors Valentinian and Valens (364–375).

10.90) seems to be a bitter attack on the doctrine of the Resurrection; and a scornful couplet against the swarms of Egyptian monks might have been written by a Reformer of the 16th century.

But it is in his criticism of life that the power of Palladas lies; with a remorselessness like that of Jonathan Swift he tears the coverings from human frailty and holds it up in its meanness and misery.

All three belong to the age of the Byzantine translators, when infinite pains were taken to rewrite well-known poems or passages in different metres, by turning Homer into elegiacs or iambics, and recasting pieces of Euripides or Menander as epigrams.