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Lycian History (Fragments) gathers the remains of the Lykiaka, a history of Lycia in southern Asia Minor by Polycharmus, a writer whose date is unknown. The work is lost and survives only in quotations in Athenaeus and Stephanus of Byzantium. The longest fragment, from the second book, describes a fish oracle of Apollo by the shore, which Stephanus places at Sura: enquirers threw spits of roasted meat into a pool that then filled with seawater, and the answer depended on the kinds of fish that appeared.
Polycharmus is one of many local historians whose work survives only in scraps, but his account of the fish oracle is a vivid and much-cited description of an unusual form of Greek divination. The other Lycian fragments are mostly place names. The set also includes a passage from a book On Aphrodite by a Polycharmus of Naucratis, telling how a small statue of the goddess saved a merchant ship in a storm; whether he is the same writer is uncertain.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: FGrHist 770; FHG IV 479). 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).