Library › Greek: Myth, Hymn & Religion › Genealogies (Fragment)
This single fragment comes from a papyrus commentary on Pindar's Paeans (P. Oxy. 2442), copied in the third century AD. The commentator cites the Genealogies, a hexameter poem that circulated under the name of Epimenides of Crete, the semi-legendary seer said to have purified Athens around 600 BC. The damaged passage refers to a figure killed by Glaucus, apparently in a contest involving a chariot team. It is numbered FGrHist 457 F 2bis.
Though only a few words long, the fragment adds to the scanty evidence for the Genealogies and shows that poems under Epimenides' name were still cited by learned commentators in Roman Egypt. Like the rest of this poetry, the Genealogies is generally thought to be a later composition ascribed to the legendary seer.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FGrHist 457 F 2bis (P.Oxy. 2442 fr. 29)). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ). The hexameter Genealogies and related poems circulated under Epimenides' name but are generally thought to be later compositions ascribed to the semi-legendary seer.