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Short Poems and Fragments gathers the minor pieces of the emperor Julian (reigned 361-363), as collected by Bidez and Cumont. They include fragments of lost prose works, among them a passage invoking Empedotimus, Pythagoras and Iamblichus, a maxim, short poems on a pipe organ and on barley beer, a verse on the metrics of a Homeric line, a prayer to Zeus, and several sayings, such as his rebuke to a crowd that acclaimed him in a temple.
The collection rounds out the portrait of Julian drawn from his speeches and letters. It shows his Neoplatonic loyalties, his taste for epigram and wordplay, and the direct manner remembered in anecdotes about him, and it preserves traces of writings that are otherwise lost.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Bidez–Cumont 161–178). 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).