Library › Greek: Tragedy › Fragments
These are the surviving fragments of Phrynichus, one of the earliest Athenian tragedians, active in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC. His plays are lost and survive only in short quotations and references, collected in Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (TrGF 3). The fragments come from plays on mythical subjects such as the sons of Aegyptus, Heracles' wrestling with Death and Antaeus, and Meleager, and from the Phoenician Women, which opened with a eunuch preparing seats for the Persian council.
Phrynichus is famous for bringing recent history to the tragic stage. According to Herodotus, his Capture of Miletus moved the Athenians to tears and he was fined, while his Phoenician Women, on the Persian defeat at Salamis, anticipated Aeschylus' Persians. His fragments are rare evidence for tragedy before Aeschylus.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: TrGF I 3 F 1–24). 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).