Library › Greek: Epic › Minyas (Fragments)
The Minyas was an early Greek epic poem, now lost and surviving only in a few quotations and a papyrus fragment. Pausanias ascribes it, tentatively, to Prodicus of Phocaea, of whom nothing else is known. The fragments include Pausanias' quotation about the ferryman Charon and his boat, and a papyrus passage, assigned to the poem by some editors, in which the hero Meleager speaks with visitors in the underworld, apparently Theseus and Pirithous.
Little as survives, the Minyas shows that early epic narratives of a descent to Hades existed beside the Odyssey's. Pausanias believed that Polygnotus followed it in his painting of the underworld at Delphi, and the fragments are an important witness to the lost epic traditions of Archaic Greece.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Bernabé, PEG I, Minyas frr. 1–8). 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). The lost epic Minyas is ascribed only by Pausanias (4.33.7), and only tentatively, to Prodicus of Phocaea.