Library › Greek: Comedy › Fragments
These are the few surviving fragments of Hipparchus, a comic poet of Athenian New Comedy. Little is known of him, and his plays are lost; the fragments survive only in quotations, chiefly by Athenaeus. They come from several plays, including The Rescued, and preserve bits of dialogue, among them a sneer at a soldier whose only wealth is a rug embroidered with Persians, a praise of skill as the most valuable possession, and talk of costly cups.
Hipparchus is one of many minor poets of New Comedy known only from scraps, but such fragments help fill out the world of Menander and his rivals. They show the stock characters and everyday concerns of the genre, such as boastful soldiers, money and luxury, and they preserve vocabulary of daily life, including words for drinking vessels.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Kock CAF III pp. 272–274). 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).