(Gr. “running back again”). A word (“Eve”), sentence, or verse (whence versus cancrinus, “crab verse”) which reads alike backward or forward. There are several varieties: (1) in the canonical form, the sentence or verse reads alike in either direction letter by letter; but (2) another variety reverses only word by word. Puttenham’s example, which he calls Verse Lyon (from the Fr.), merely reverses the order of the words.
The reputed inventor of the p. was Sotades, a minor Alexandrian poet of the early 3d C.B.C. who wrote virulent invective (q.v.) and obscene verses there are no extant examples from the Cl. Gr. period. The best known p. in post-Cl. Gr. is nipson anomemata me monan opsin (“wash my transgressions, not only my face”), attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus (329-89) and often inscribed on fonts in monasteries or churches. Other familiar ones in Lat. are: “Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor” and the socalled devil’s verse, “Signa te, signa, temere me tangis et angis.” William Camden illustrates type (2): “Odo tenet mulum, madidam mappam tenet Anna.” Ps. were esp. popular in Byzantine times, and we possess a number of them written by the emperor Leo the Wise (10th c.). Ger. ps. were written by J. H. Riese in the 17th c.; and in 1802 Ambrose Pam-peris published in Vienna a pamphlet containing ps. recounting the campaigns of Catherine the Great. Among the best known examples of ps. are: “Madam, I’m Adam” and “Able was I ere I saw Elba,” the latter attributed to Napoleon.
The metrical analogue of the p. is reciprocus versus, a line which scans identically forward and backward, either letter-by-letter or word-by-word. Sidonius Apollinaris mentions versus recurrentes which, when read backward, retain the same order of letters and meter ( Roma tibi. above): this is a p. both in sense and meter. And Virgil’s “Musa, is still a dactylic hexameter when the order of the words is reversed:
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