Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Elegies (Fragments)
These Elegies are the surviving elegiac verses of Critias, the Athenian aristocrat, poet and sophist who was a relative of Plato and a leader of the Thirty Tyrants in 404 to 403 BC. His poems are lost and survive only in quotations by Athenaeus, Plutarch and others. They include a catalogue of the best inventions of different peoples, from the Sicilian game of cottabus to Thessalian chairs, lines on the recall of Alcibiades, praise of Spartan moderation in drinking, and Chilon's maxim nothing in excess.
The elegies show Critias as a sympotic and political poet who admired Spartan restraint and took an interest in the origins of customs and crafts, a theme also found among the sophists. They offer a view of aristocratic culture in late fifth-century Athens from a figure better known for his role in the city's political violence.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: DK 88 B 2, 4–9). 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).