Library › Greek: Comedy › Karchedonios (Fragments)
These are the fragments of Menander's comedy Karchedonios (The Carthaginian) preserved as quotations by later authors, separate from the papyrus text of the play. Menander (c. 342–c. 290 BC) was the leading Athenian poet of New Comedy. The quotations are brief: a character who burned incense to the North Wind but caught no fish and must boil lentils instead, the maxim that no one knows who his father was, a line on the harvest song Lityerses, and isolated rare words.
Such fragments were gathered by grammarians and anthologists for vocabulary or for their sententious force. Here they preserve the sayings that need teaches even the uncultured to be clever and that what is right is somehow stronger than law, while the line on uncertain fatherhood touches a theme at the heart of New Comedy, with its foundlings and recognitions and the question of the hero's birth raised in the papyrus.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Sandbach OCT, Karchedonios frr. apud alios servata). 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).