Library › Greek: History › On Rhodes (Fragment)
On Rhodes was a work by Dionysius Thrax, the second-century BC grammarian who taught on Rhodes. It is lost; a single fragment survives, quoted by Stephanus of Byzantium in his entry on Tarsus. The passage records Dionysius' explanation of the name of the Cilician city: Tarsus was named from the fall of Bellerophon, since tarsos is part of the foot, and the ancients were commemorating his lameness.
The fragment shows that Dionysius, best known as a grammarian, also wrote on local history and legend, probably reflecting his years on Rhodes. It illustrates the ancient taste for etymology, in which the names of cities were explained through myth and heroic story.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FGrHist 512 F 1). 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).