Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Fragment
This is a short elegiac fragment quoted by the geographer Strabo, who says it may be by Hedylus or by someone else. Written in the voice of deer sacred to Phoebus Apollo, it tells how they swam across the sea from the Corycian heights in Cilicia to Cape Kourias in Cyprus, a marvel to those who saw it. No title for the poem is recorded.
The piece shows how Hellenistic poets turned local wonders and cult stories into polished verse, and how geographers such as Strabo drew on poetry as evidence. Its uncertain attribution is itself typical of the scattered and fragmentary survival of Hellenistic elegy.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: SH 459 (Strabo 14.6.3)). 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). Strabo 14.6.3 quotes this elegy on the deer that swam to Cape Kourias 'whether it is by Hedylus or by someone else', so the ascription is the ancient source's own guess.