Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Lament for a Son (Papyrus)
Lament for a Son (Papyrus) is an anonymous lyric lament preserved in fragmentary form on a papyrus. A mother mourns her son, whom she calls Light-bringer and a second Sun, and promises to plant golden trees around his tomb. She compares her grief with that of Clymene for Phaethon at the Eridanus, of Cybele for Attis and of Aphrodite for Adonis, and speaks of the sistrum calling him to the night of Lethe.
The piece is an example of the sung lament of the Roman and late-antique world, in which private grief is expressed through a chain of mythical parallels. Its mixture of Greek myth with the cults of Cybele, Adonis and Isis, whose sistrum it mentions, reflects the religious world of Greco-Roman Egypt.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions. 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).