The ancient Greek poet Sotades (3rd century BCE) invented a form of Ionic meter called Sotadic or Sotadean verse, which is sometimes said to have been palindromic, but no examples survive, and the exact nature of the "reverse" readings is unclear.

A palindrome was found as a graffito at Herculaneum, a city buried by ash in 79 CE. This palindrome, called the Sator Square, consists of a sentence written in Latin: "Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas" ("The sower Arepo holds with effort the wheels"). It is remarkable for the fact that the first letters of each word form the first word, the second letters form the second word, and so forth. Hence, it can be arranged into a word square that reads in four different ways: horizontally or vertically from either top left to bottom right or bottom right to top left. As such, they can be referred to as palindromatic.