Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Epigram (Anth. Pal. 7.304)
Epigram (Anth. Pal. 7.304) is a four-line epitaph preserved in the Palatine Anthology, where it is headed with the name of Pisander of Rhodes. It commemorates a Thessalian named Hippaemon, son of Haemon, together with his horse Podargus, his dog Lethargus and his servant Babes, and says that he fell fighting among the foremost. The heading has been taken to mean the archaic epic poet Pisander of Camirus, but most scholars doubt that he wrote it, and Gow and Page print it among the Hellenistic epigrams.
The poem neatly packs a man, his horse, his dog and his servant into its opening couplet and closes with a conventional heroic death. Its speaking names, such as Podargus ("swift-foot") for the horse and Lethargus for the dog, show the kind of wit that later epigrammatists prized. It also shows how uncertain the Anthology's headings can be, since a name such as Pisander could point to more than one poet.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Anth. Pal. 7.304; Gow–Page, Hellenistic Epigrams). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ). The Anthology heads the epigram 'Πεισάνδρου Ῥοδίου', but most scholars doubt that it is by the archaic epic poet of Camirus.