Language and Languages in the Epigrams of Palladas of Alexandria

The poet Palladas of Alexandria is one of the most curious figures of Late Antique literature. In his ca. 160 epigrams preserved as a part of the Greek Anthology and dating from 4th c. AD, he assumes the poetic persona of a poor schoolmaster equally distanced from the crowds of Christian monks flooding the streets of his home city and from the teachings of his contemporary pagan philosophers. It seems probable that he might have been indeed a italicized by trade, since many of his poems abound in linguistic puns, word plays (successful or less so), and parodies of the great poets from the literary canon, especially Homer, as well as of their commentators, the famed Alexandrian grammarians, Palladas’ colleagues. In several of his works, he even goes beyond the realm of the Greek language in order to make jokes about Latin loanwords used by his fellow citizens. The present paper will examine the attitude of the poet towards language reflected by such linguistic puns and jokes in his works.