Library › Greek: Grammar & Reference › Scholia on Callimachus' Hecale (Diegesis)
This is a papyrus fragment of a prose summary (diegesis) of the Hecale, the short epic by Callimachus, the Alexandrian poet of the third century BC, which told how the young Theseus, on his way to fight the bull of Marathon, sheltered in the hut of the old woman Hecale. Only a few broken lines survive, describing a secret departure, a sudden downpour, the fall of night and Hecale's house.
The Hecale was one of Callimachus' most admired poems but survives only in fragments. Summaries like this one, however damaged, help reconstruct the outline of its plot and place the surviving lines. This scrap preserves the storm and nightfall that bring Theseus to Hecale's door, the scene around which the poem was built.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions. 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).