Library › Greek: History › On Phrygia (Fragment)
On Phrygia was a work in two books by Metrophanes of Eucarpia, a sophist of about the 3rd to 4th century AD named in the Suda. It is lost, and only this brief fragment survives, quoted by Stephanus of Byzantium. It explains the name of Eucarpia in Lesser Phrygia by the fruitfulness of the land, where a single cluster of grapes was said to grow so large that it split a wagon in two.
Little is known of Metrophanes beyond the Suda's notice, but the fragment shows the local patriotism of provincial writers, who explained place names by stories of fertility and divine favour. It also records a native tradition that Zeus gave the region to Demeter and Dionysus, preserving a scrap of the religious lore of inland Asia Minor.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Müller FHG IV (Metrophanes); FGrHist 796). 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).