Palladas

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Some Palladian Presences

Anthologia Graeca Planudea = Anthologia diafo ron epigrammato n ed. Ianos Laskaris, Firenze: Laurentius de Alopa

(1494)

"

Among the greater Greek classics, only

Homer and Isocrates were in print before the

Anthology; and during the sixteenth century few of the classics were more often reedited" (James Hutton, The Greek Anthology

in Italy to the Year 1800 (Ithaca, New York,

1935), p. 38.

Just a few poets soon inspired by or using Palladas:

Lope di Vega

Ronsard

Olivier de Magny

John Donne, “For than kisses, letters mingle Soules

For thus friends absent speak” (Palladas 9.401)

Herrick

Ezra Pound. Not only translates some Palladas, but see ‘Horace’,

Arion 9 (1970) 178-87:

His jibes at old women are like petty personal fusses lacking the charm of Palladas'

impartial pessimism or the artistic aloofness, the Epicurean and really godlike impersonality of Catullus..

Palladas as ‘Poet’s poet’:

See e.g.

John Frederick Nims

(1913-1999)

Palladas’ “bios/skene” epigram is pivotal to his postwar Masque of

Blackness

The streets and rooms they moved in rang unreal

Since not yet real to the child; say someone's dream

Strange as drowned cities where the cursive eel

Flashes in alleys. A curtain-time scene:

Whether they shifted vases, turned a page

All seemed last-minute touches on a stage.

The stage and a man's life-long before Avon

Cynical Palladas saw we "play a part."

Though of that scenery or the gapes it gave on

Hard to say which is model and which art.

Down the steep aisles of a murky vast

Theater, all seats empty, he and she

Go groping backstage; from a passionate past

Glitter the lurid flats of cloud and sea.

Palladas and prose fiction

Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels—especially in some of the more arcane proper names

Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (source of the opera), has the epigraph (in Greek):

Πᾶσα γυνὴ χόλος ἐστίν· ἔχει δ᾽ δύω ὥρας,

τὴν μίαν ἐν θαλάμῳ, τὴν μίαν ἐν θανάτῳ.

 Thomas Love Peacock’s Lucianic, comic Gryll Grange (1861), uses the bios/skene epigram as its epigraph.

Palladas and the Philosophers

Neil Cooper, ‘Moral Nihilism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74

(1973-4) 75-90:

‘ I want in this paper to consider the view which may be called 'Moral

Nihilism' or 'Moral Indifferentism', according to which nothing matters morally. Some such view may accompany cynicism or radical despair.

The late Greek poet Palladas expresses it…

[he goes on to quote several epigrams]

‘Rites-de-passage’, pedagogical Palladas

‘ Learned

FOOTNOTE

PALLADAS’ e.g.

The works of

Anacreon, Sappho,

Bion, Moschus and

Musæus. Translated from the original

Greek. By Francis

Fawkes, M.A.

London,

MDDCLXXXIX

[1789]

Anthologisable

Palladas who in every era has sounded

‘modern’ enough to be interleaved with

‘contemporary’ epigrams and other short poems

Those were the days—when Latin quantities were discussed without

English translation in

The Times

GRAECULUS. "To

The Editor Of The

Times." Times

[London, England]

17 Jan. 1894: 6. The

Times Digital

Archive. Web. 31

Aug. 2014.

D. CACLAMANOS.

"The New

Type."

Times

[Lond on, England] 10

Oct. 1932: 10. By the year after,

English translation of Palladas is provided

Cavafy’s Palladian aspects

His own relationship with Alexandria (cf. his fascination with Herodas’ mimes when they appeared)

His fascination with the pagan perspective on the early Christians

His urban settings (also preferred by Harrison, who sees this as distinguishing him from

Ted Hughes, the other late 20 th -century Yorkshire poet.

His mournful, cynical and non-optimistic tone

His lapidary textures

His immersion with and constant allusion to a dense literary heritage

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