Library › Greek: Oratory & Rhetoric › Oration Fragment (P.Oslo inv. 1478)
This is a small and badly damaged papyrus scrap in the Oslo collection, P.Oslo inv. 1478, containing parts of a Greek prose text. Its editors identified it as a fragment of an oration by Himerius, the fourth-century AD sophist who taught at Athens, on the basis of its Lesbian and lyric themes. No title survives, and most lines preserve only a few letters or words.
If the identification is correct, the papyrus is a rare direct witness to Himerius' speeches outside the medieval manuscripts. It fits his known habit of drawing on the lyric poets of Lesbos. Even so small a piece shows how papyri can add to, and test, what we know of ancient rhetorical texts.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: P.Oslo inv. 1478). 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). The ascription of this small, badly damaged papyrus scrap to Himerius rests on its editors' identification (Lesbian and lyric themes), not on a named title.