Library › Latin: Lyric & Elegy › Laus Metrica Paschalis Papae
This short poem of praise is attributed to Milo, a monk of Saint-Aubin at Angers, and is addressed to Pope Paschal II, who reigned from 1099 to 1118. In rhymed hexameters, the poet hails the pope as one to be magnified and feared everywhere, keeper of the faith of Peter’s house, light and ornament of the Church, head of the world and image of wisdom, a model of law for the future, at whose coming terror broke Benevento.
The poet declares that even if dialectic renewed genus and species, if Aristotle recovered his knowledge, if Cicero and Plato rose again and Ovid brought songs from Parnassus, they could scarcely praise the pope worthily. He ends with a play on the Pythagorean letter Y, the forked path of life. The poem is a small example of the verse panegyric addressed to popes by the monastic and cathedral schools of the Loire region.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 163, Parisiis 1854), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). 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.