Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Fragments
These are fragments of Posidippus of Pella, a Macedonian poet of the early third century BC who worked at the court of the Ptolemies in Alexandria. Apart from his epigrams, his poetry is lost, and these few pieces survive in quotations and on writing tablets. The longest is the so-called Seal of Posidippus, an elegy preserved on wax tablets, in which the aged poet calls on the Muses to sing of his old age and hopes to be remembered.
The Seal is a rare personal poem from the Hellenistic period, in which a poet speaks of his own career and his hopes for fame. The shorter fragments add to the picture of Posidippus as a learned poet with interests in myth and astronomy, beyond the epigrams for which he is best known.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: SH 698–705). 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).