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Praxilla of Sicyon was a lyric poet of the fifth century BC, known for hymns, dithyrambs and drinking songs. Her poetry is lost and survives only in a few quotations. The fragments include a speech of Adonis in the underworld naming what he misses most, sunlight, the stars and the moon, and then ripe cucumbers, apples and pears, as well as drinking-song maxims such as 'under every stone lurks a scorpion' and a lyric addressed to a girl at a window.
Praxilla is one of the few women poets of ancient Greece whose words survive at all. Her Adonis lines became proverbial, and a metre was named after her. The fragments give a glimpse of the songs sung at Greek drinking parties and of a poet whom ancient critics counted among the notable women lyricists.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: PMG 747–754). 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).