Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Lament for a Murmillo (P.Ryl. 15)
Lament for a Murmillo is an anonymous lyric poem preserved on a papyrus of the second century AD in the John Rylands Library (P.Ryl. I 15). A woman speaks of a young man who has been persuaded to fight in the arena as a murmillo, a type of gladiator, against a net-fighter and wild beasts. She complains that he has left her alone and calls on Zeus to hear her cry. The end of the papyrus is badly damaged.
Greek poetry about the gladiatorial games is very rare, and this piece shows that the arena, a Roman institution, had become part of life and song in the Greek-speaking East. The poem's language is lyric and emotional, and it gives a glimpse of popular song under the Roman Empire.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: P.Ryl. I 15). 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).