Palladas Poems

The women mock me for being old,
Bidding me look at the wreck of my years in the mirror.
But I, as I approach the end of my life,
...

Waking we burst, at each return of morn,
From death's dull fetters and again are born.
No longer ours the moments that have passed;
...

Pity, says the Theban bard,
From my wishes I discard;
Envy, let me rather be,
Rather far, a theme for thee.
Pity to distress is shown;
Envy to the great alone.
So the Theban. But to shine
Less conspicuous be mine.
I prefer the golden mean,
Pomp and penury between.
For alarm and peril wait
Ever on the loftiest state;
And the lowest to the end
Obloquy and scorn attend.
...

Life is a perilous voyage;
For often we are tempest-tossed in it
And are in a worse case than shipwrecked men.
With Fortune at Life's helm we sail uncertainly
As on the open seas,
Some on a fair voyage,
Others the reverse:
But all alike reach one harbour
Under the earth.
...

This life a theatre we well may call,
Where every actor must perform with art,
Or laught it through, and make a farce of all,
Or learn to bear with grace his tragic part.
...

Upon life's tempest-troubled seas afloat,
We strike worse rocks than shipwrecked sailors know;
Wich Chance the pilot of our storm-tossed boat,
Upon a doubtful dangerous voyage we go;
Though some fair weather, and some foul have found,
We all meet in one haven underground.
...

Tell me whence comes it
That thou measurest the Universe
And the limits of the Earth,
Thou who bearest a little body
Made of a little earth?
Count thyself first
And know thyself,
And then shalt thou
Count this infinite Earth.
And if thou canst not reckon
Thy body's little store of clay,
How canst thou know
The measures of the immeasurable?
...

I swore ten thousand times
To make no more epigrams,
For I had brought on my head
The enmity of many fools,
But when I set eyes on the face
Of the Paphlagonian Pentagathus
I can't repress the malady.
...

Thou hast a score of parts no good,
But two divinely shown:
Thy Daphne a true piece of wood,
Thy Niobe a stone.
...

I was born weeping, having wept I die,
And all my life in many tears is passed.
O tearful race of weak humanity!
Dragged under earth to moulder at the last.
...