Stjepan Gradić: Hendecasyllabi

This short poem in hendecasyllables by Stjepan Gradić praises an unnamed poet as the best of all the learned men of the present age or of wiser antiquity, second to none in counsel or in the rich flow of his learned tongue. Eloquence and letters, the poet says, call him the glory of the Latin Muse and the light of ancestral eloquence; to his labours the language owes its grace and charm, its refinement and the beauties of pure diction. Through him ancient Persuasion returns from exile and darkness, rusticity and barbarism retreat to the shades below, and Rome itself learns to be Latin.

The poem is a compliment to a Latin stylist of Gradić’s time, probably written as a commendatory piece for a printed book, though the addressee is not named in the text given here. It reflects the seventeenth-century concern for purity of Latin style and Gradić’s own standing in Roman learned circles. It is a small example of the occasional verse exchanged among scholars in Baroque Rome.