Library › Greek: Prose Fiction › Metiochus and Parthenope (P.Berol. 7927)
Metiochus and Parthenope (P.Berol. 7927) is the longest surviving fragment of an anonymous Greek novel about Metiochus, son of the Athenian Miltiades, and Parthenope, daughter of Polycrates of Samos. Preserved on papyri in Berlin, it describes a scene at Polycrates' court, where the king questions the young stranger about his arrival and Metiochus explains that he fled the plots of his stepmother Hegesipyle. The talk then turns to a symposium discussion of Eros.
This fragment gives the clearest picture of the novel, one of the earliest Greek romances, probably composed in the first century BC or AD. It shows how the genre set its lovers among real historical figures, such as the philosopher Anaximenes, and embedded learned conversation within the plot. The same story was later retold in Persian, making the novel an important link between Greek fiction and medieval Persian literature.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: P.Berol. 7927 + 9588 + 21179; Stephens & Winkler 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).