Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Epinicians (Fragments)
This set contains the few fragments of victory odes by Bacchylides of Ceos, the lyric poet of the fifth century BC and nephew of Simonides, that are not part of the epinicians preserved on the London papyrus. They are very short: a phrase describing how the men of Mantinea carry the trident of Poseidon on their bronze-worked shields, a line of papyrus scraps, and a maxim that gain overpowers even a shrewd human mind.
Bacchylides' victory odes for winners at the great games are known chiefly from the papyrus published in 1897. These quotations and scraps come from other odes now lost and show how much of his work once circulated. The maxim on gain is typical of the moral reflections that punctuate his poems.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Snell–Maehler, fragmenta epiniciorum). 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).