Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Fragments
These Fragments are the surviving lines of Licymnius of Chios, a dithyrambic poet and teacher of rhetoric of the late fifth or early fourth century BC. His poems are lost and survive only in quotations. One fragment, quoted by Sextus Empiricus, invokes Health (Hygieia) as queen and bright-eyed mother; another describes the river Acheron ferrying griefs to mortals; and a third, quoted by Athenaeus, tells how Sleep loved Endymion and lulled him with eyes open.
Licymnius is mentioned by Plato and Aristotle as a teacher of style, and Aristotle notes that his poems were written to be read. His fragments give a glimpse of the ornate style of the late classical dithyramb, and they show how poets personified powers such as Health and Sleep.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: PMG 769–771). 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).