Library › Greek: Prose Fiction › Metiochus and Parthenope (O.Bodl. 2175)
Metiochus and Parthenope (O.Bodl. 2175) is a brief fragment of an anonymous Greek novel, written on a potsherd in Roman Egypt. The novel, known from papyri and this ostracon, told the love story of Metiochus, son of the Athenian Miltiades, and Parthenope, daughter of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos. In this scrap a speaker addresses Parthenope, reproaching her for forgetting "your Metiochus" and saying that since the day she left his eyes have found no sleep.
The novel is one of the earliest Greek romances, set in the historical world of the sixth century BC, and its story survived long enough to be retold in a Persian poem of the eleventh century. Even this small fragment shows the heightened, emotional language of separated lovers typical of the genre, and its survival on an ostracon, perhaps as a school exercise, hints at the story's popularity.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: O.Bodl. II 2175; Stephens & Winkler, Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments (1995)). 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).