Library › Greek: History › On Chios (Fragment)
This single fragment of a work On Chios is ascribed to Hypermenes, a writer otherwise unknown and attested only from this citation by Ptolemy Chennus, whose book is summarised by Photius. It tells that Homer had a servant named Scindapsus, who was fined a thousand drachmas by the Chians for failing to burn his master's body, and adds that the inventor of the stringed instrument called the scindapsus was an Eretrian, the son of a flute-girl named Poikile.
Ptolemy Chennus is notorious for citing authorities who may never have existed, so Hypermenes may well be one of his inventions. The fragment is best read as an example of the playful pseudo-learning of the Roman imperial period and of the anecdotes that gathered around Homer.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Müller, FHG IV). 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). Hypermenes is known only from this citation by Ptolemy Chennus (via Photius, Bibl. 190), whose named authorities are often thought to be invented.