Stjepan Gradić: Epistola ad Junium Palmottam

This verse letter in elegiac couplets from Stjepan Gradić (1613–1683), the Ragusan scholar in Rome, is addressed to his friend, the poet Junije Palmotić in Dubrovnik. Gradić opens with a string of mythological comparisons: not even Ulysses on seeing Penelope, Athens on Theseus’s return from the underworld, or the Greeks after the ten-year war at Troy felt such joy as he did when a letter reached him from the Illyrian shores, his one comfort amid sadness and cares. If his friend asks the cause of his sorrow, it is that he lives by the Tiber, where the third winter is now passing without a single happy day; he compares his laments to those of Hecuba and Philomela.

The poem is a fine example of the Ovidian verse epistle, recalling the exile poetry of the Tristia, adapted to express a Ragusan’s homesickness in Rome. It documents the friendship between Gradić and Palmotić, of whom Gradić later wrote a biography, and gives a personal glimpse of the early years of Gradić’s Roman career before he rose to high office in the Vatican Library. Its classical allusions are dense but conventional, and repay a slow reading.