Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Fragments
These are the surviving fragments of Herodicus of Babylon, a Greek grammarian of the second century BC and a follower of Crates of Mallos. His prose work Against the Socrates-Lover is known through Athenaeus, who quotes from it and preserves his elegiac verses. One poem mocks the followers of Aristarchus as pedants obsessed with tiny pronouns. The collection also includes verses about Socrates and Alcibiades, ascribed to Aspasia, which Herodicus quoted.
The fragments show the fierce rivalry between the scholarly schools of Pergamum and Alexandria, led by Crates and Aristarchus. They also preserve Herodicus' hostile view of Socrates and his circle, which fed into later gossip about the philosophers, and they keep verses that would otherwise be lost.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: SH 494–495). 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).