A Latin Hymn to the Creator Ascribed to Plato

Abstract

A hymn to the Creator ascribed to Plato deserves attention, even if both form and content show clearly that it is of much later date. Such a poem is preserved in the Anthologia Latina, where it is introduced as a translation from Greek made by “a certain Tiberianus.” This interesting document, in thirty-two verses, may be translated as follows: “Almighty, borne by age-old heavens, amid Thy myriad virtues Thou art ever One, and no one can measure Thee with number or with time. Now (if by any name it is meet to invoke Thee) Thou shalt be invoked by the unknown name in which Thou, the Holy One, dost rejoice, whereat the mighty earth trembles, and the wandering stars stand in their swift course. Thou art One and likewise Many, Thou art First and Last, Thou art at once the Center and the Survivor of the universe. For Thou art without end, yet Thou bringest an end to the swift passage of time, and on high, from eternity, Thou dost behold harsh fate swept on with immutable whirl, Thou dost behold lives enclosed in time and again led back and returned to the upper spheres — so that the vitality, exhausted by births, which the universe has lost may return to it and may again circulate through the (celestial) bodies.”

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.