Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Teliambic Fragment (Papyrus)
The Teliambic Fragment is a short, badly damaged poem preserved on papyrus. Its author is unknown and its date uncertain. The surviving lines, broken into stanzas marked by the refrain 'play the pipe for me' (aulei moi), move among images of shepherds, bulls and song, and reflect on wealth, fortune and pleasure, observing that people are forever counting their money and inviting friends to enjoy luxury.
Though only scraps survive, the poem belongs to the tradition of moralizing and convivial verse that flourished in the Hellenistic and later periods, where reflections on money and the passing of life were set to music. Its refrain structure makes it an interesting witness to popular song forms rarely preserved in literary manuscripts.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Powell, Collectanea Alexandrina (1925) (identification unconfirmed)). 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).