Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Epigrams on Marvels (Fragments)
Epigrams on Marvels (Fragments) collects the surviving elegiac verses of Archelaus of Chersonesus, a Hellenistic writer on natural wonders of whom little else is known. His poems are lost except for these short pieces quoted by later authors. They describe the supposed generation of creatures from dead bodies: scorpions from a crocodile, wasps from a horse, bees from an ox, and a snake from the marrow of a human spine.
These verses belong to paradoxography, the Hellenistic literature of marvels that collected surprising facts about nature, and show that the genre could be written in verse as well as prose. They also preserve the widespread ancient belief in spontaneous generation, familiar from the bees of Virgil's Georgics, and the poet's wonder at nature's endless transformations.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: SH 125–129). 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).