Library › Latin: Lyric & Elegy › Epigrammation
This short epigram in elegiac couplets, attributed to an early poet named Papinius, is preserved by Varro in his discussion of the old word cascus, meaning “old.” It mocks an aged man, Casca, son of Potonius, whose young girlfriend calls him her boy; the poet suggests that she should be called his girl, for that would be “mules scratching each other,” since he is truly the boy and his lover the old woman.
Nothing is known of Papinius beyond this poem, which is one of the earliest Latin epigrams to survive and shows the witty, personal invective that later flourished in Catullus and Martial. It owes its survival to Varro’s antiquarian interest in archaic vocabulary.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: J. Blänsdorf, FPL, 2011), licensed CC BY-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.