Library › Greek: Satire & Fable › Egyptian Iliad (Fragments)
The Egyptian Iliad was a parody of Homeric epic by a poet named Hipparchus, of whom nothing else is known. The work is lost and survives only in two short passages quoted by Athenaeus in the Deipnosophists, who refers to Hipparchus as the author of the Egyptian Iliad. In mock-epic hexameters the speaker delights in a casserole and roast pork and declares that the life of the Egyptians never pleased him.
Epic parody was a lively Greek genre that applied the grand style of Homer to food, drink and everyday life. These fragments show that tradition at work and reflect Greek attitudes toward Egypt and its customs. They are a reminder that this Hipparchus is distinct from the astronomer of Nicaea.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: SH 496–497). 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).