Palladas was a 4th-century AD teacher of literature in Alexandria. A pagan in the age of the violent advent of Christianity, he witnessed the anti-pagan riots led by Bishop Theophilos. His attitude to these changes is unclear but his poetry is imbued with a melancholic pessimism and a fierce satirical quality.

Palladas’s poems were collected in The Palatine Anthology, a Byzantine assembly of some 4,000 poems spanning the 7th century BC to the 6th AD. Their tetchy humour is captured by Tony Harrison in Palladas: Poems.