Tony Harrison’s selection of poems by the fourth-century Alexandrian epigrammatist compellingly recreates the bitter wit which he describes as ‘the authentic snarl of a man trapped physically in poverty and persecution, and metaphysically in a deep sense of the futile’. As he writes in his preface, ‘Palladas … is generally regarded as the last poet of Paganism, and it is in this role that I have sought to present a consistent dramatic personality … His are the last hopeless blasts of the old Hellenistic world, giving way reluctantly, but without much resistance, before the cataclysm of Christianity.’