In addition to his great provincial travels and skills of leadership, Hadrian was an unrivaled patron of the arts. He was considered an expert in many fields, such as arithmetic, geometry, architecture, painting, poetry and music. Hadrian surrounded himself with men of genius: the poet and satirist Juvenal, the philosophers Epictetus and Heliodorus, the historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Arrian and writers Pliny the Younger, Pausanias and Plutarch but also Mesomedes, a Greek lyric poet and composer.
Mesomedes, of Cretian birth, was a freedman and court poet of Hadrian. He wrote paens glorifying his patron and his policies, such as the “Hymn to Nemesis”. The hymn is one of four which preserve the ancient musical notation written over the text; the other three are ”Invocation of the Muse”, “Hymn to the Sun”, and “Invocation of Calliope and Apollo”. A total of 15 poems by Mesomedes are known. They were preserved through Alexandrian and later Byzantine sources.
‘Hymn to Nemesis’ an English translation with Greek original and audio recording in Greek
Links and further reading: Wikipedia, Find A Grave
