Library › Greek: History › Politika (Fragment)
This is a single fragment of the Politika of Menesthenes, a Greek writer about whom little is known. The work is lost, and this passage from its fourth book survives only as a quotation in Athenaeus' Deipnosophists. It concerns a golden drinking vessel called a holmos, shaped like a horn, which Menesthenes mentions along with a twisted collar in connection with a figure named Albatanes.
Athenaeus preserved the fragment in his long catalogue of drinking cups, where he gathered rare names and descriptions of vessels from many authors. It offers a glimpse of the antiquarian detail found in lost Greek prose works and of the scholarship on material culture that Athenaeus assembled.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FHG IV; Athenaeus XI 502b). 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).