Library › Latin: Lyric & Elegy › Epitaphium
This elegiac epitaph by Leonardo Teronda honours Niccolò III d’Este, marquis of Ferrara, son of Alberto, who died in 1441. It praises him as greater than his people, their good law and safe protection, who guarded his subjects against the arms and plots of powerful neighbours, bound quarrelling states in new treaties and was the mediator between war and peace. Ferrara, it says, became a forum for the world, where popes, kings and peoples sent advocates to settle their disputes; the marquis died while visiting the lord of the Insubrians, that is, the duke of Milan, bearing the weight of affairs and honours.
Niccolò III did die in Milan, where he had gone to take up a role in the government of Filippo Maria Visconti, and the epitaph alludes to this precisely. Among the Latin epitaphs written for the marquis, Teronda’s is notable for presenting Ferrara as an international centre of arbitration, an image strengthened by the Council of Ferrara held there in 1438. Little is known of the author beyond this poem.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque and its collection Poeti d’Italia in lingua latina (edition: L. Capra, 1973, Musisque Deoque 2007), through Corpus Corporum (University of Zurich). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.