Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Fragments
Pratinas of Phlius was a poet of the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC, active at Athens, where ancient sources say he competed against Aeschylus and credit him with introducing the satyr play. His works are lost and survive only in a few quotations, mostly in Athenaeus. The longest fragment is a lively choral song in which the chorus protests that the pipe (aulos) should follow the song, not drown it out, and claims Dionysus as its own.
The main fragment is a vivid document of early Greek music and a key text in debates about the dithyramb, the satyr play and the rise of instrumental music. Its date and genre are still discussed, but its playful abuse of the pipe and its compound words give a rare taste of choral poetry of this period.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: PMG 708–713). 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).