Laudator Temporis Acti

Greek Anthology 9.400 (ascribed to Palladas; tr. W.R. Paton):

Revered Hypatia, ornament of learning, stainless star of wise teaching, when I see thee and thy discourse I worship thee, looking on the starry house of the Virgin; for thy business is in heaven.

Ὅταν βλέπω σε, προσκυνῶ, καὶ τοὺς λόγους,
τῆς παρθένου τὸν οἶκον ἀστρῷον βλέπων·
εἰς οὐρανὸν γάρ ἐστι σοῦ τὰ πράγματα,
Ὑπατία σεμνή, τῶν λόγων εὐμορφία,
ἄχραντον ἄστρον τῆς σοφῆς παιδεύσεως.        5

The rough breathing and acute accent are missing from the first letter of this poem in the Digital Loeb Classical Library, as the following screen capture shows:


Latin translation by Hugo Grotius:

Colat necesse est literas, te qui videt
Et virginalem spectat astrigeram domum:
Negotium namque omne cum coelo tibi,
Hypatia prudens, dulce sermonis decus,
Sapientis artis sidus integerrimum.

J.C. Wernsdorf, De Hypatia Philosopha Alexandrina (Wittenberg: Schlomach, 1747), p. 33 (after quoting Grotius' translation):

Duos priores uersus sic mallem conuertere:

Te quando specto, te colo et uoces tuas
Et uirginalem specto sideream domum, etc.

Georg Luck, "Palladas: Christian or Pagan?" Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 63 (1958) 455-471 (at 462-467), argued that Palladas wasn't the author of this poem and that Hypatia here was someone other than the famous mathematician-philosopher. Alan Cameron, The Greek Anthology: From Meleager to Planudes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 323-325, apparently agreed with Luck and offered further arguments, although Cameron's book is unavailable to me. Opposed to Luck and Cameron are:

• J. Irmscher, "Palladas und Hypatia (zu Anthologia Palatina 9.400)," in Acta Antiqua Philippopolitana: Studia Historica et Philologica (Sofia: In aedibus Typographicis Academiae Scientiarum Bulgaricae, 1963), pp. 313-318 (non vidi)
• Marc D. Lauxtermann, "The Palladas Sylloge," Mnemosyne 50.3 (June, 1997) 329-337 (at 335, n. 5)
• Enrico Livrea, "A.P. 9.400: Iscrizione funeraria di Ipazia?" Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 117 (1997) 99-102
• Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia. Die spätantiken Quellen. Eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 295-315 (non vidi)

Labels: typographical and other errors