Library › Greek: Comedy › Koneiazomenai
The Koneiazomenai (Women Drinking Hemlock) is a comedy by Menander of Athens (c. 342–c. 290 BC), the leading poet of Greek New Comedy. The play is lost except for fragments, and this text is its surviving papyrus portion, a few damaged scenes. In one, two characters trade astonished news of five talents and a wedding already under way, and one goes in to see for himself; in another, a speaker admits he wrongly called Fortune blind, since she has now saved him.
The title is unexplained by the surviving lines, and the plot cannot be reconstructed. The speech on Fortune, however, is characteristic of Menander and of the Hellenistic age, when Tyche was seen as the power behind sudden reversals: its closing advice, that no one in trouble should despair, since misfortune may be the occasion of some good, echoes a theme found in many of his comedies.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Sandbach OCT, Koneiazomenai (papyrus)). 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).