Library › Greek: Epic › Dardanica (Fragment)
This is a fragment of the Dardanica, a lost poem by Hegemon of Alexandria Troas, an epic poet about whom little is known. It survives only in a paraphrase by Aelian in On the Nature of Animals, who reports Hegemon's story that the Thessalian Aleuas, while tending cattle on Mount Ossa, was loved by a serpent, and adds his own sceptical comments on Hegemon's embellishments.
The passage is typical of the wonder tales about animals that Aelian collected from poets and historians. It also preserves a local legend about Aleuas, the ancestor of the powerful Aleuad family of Thessaly, from an otherwise vanished regional epic.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FGrHist 110 F 1 (Aelian, NA 8.11)). 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).