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Thucydides (attributed): Epitaph for Euripides

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The Epitaph for Euripides is a four-line elegiac epigram on the tragedian, who died in Macedonia in 406 BC, preserved in the Greek Anthology (7.45). It declares that all Greece is Euripides' monument, while Macedonian earth holds his bones, and that Athens was his homeland. The ancient Life of Euripides ascribes it to Thucydides the historian or to Timotheus the lyric poet, and the attribution to Thucydides is doubted.

Whoever wrote it, the epigram is an early expression of Euripides' status as a poet of all Greece, and it reflects the tradition of a cenotaph at Athens for a poet buried abroad. Its description of Athens as the Greece of Greece was quoted in later antiquity as a tribute to the city.

About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Anth. Pal. 7.45). 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 Life of Euripides gives this epigram to 'Thucydides the historian or Timotheus the lyric poet', and the ascription to Thucydides is doubted.

Ancient Greek · Lyric & Elegy
Epitaph for Euripides
Thucydides (attributed) · every word parsed
45.1.1
Μνᾶμα μὲν Ἑλλὰς ἅπαςʼ Εὐριπίδου, ὀστέα δʼ ἴσχει
45.1.2
γῆ Μακεδών, ᾗπερ δέξατο τέρμα βίου.
45.1.3
πατρὶς δʼ Ἑλλάδος Ἑλλάς, Ἀθῆναι· πλεῖστα δὲ Μούσαις
45
τέρψας ἐκ πολλῶν καὶ τὸν ἔπαινον ἔχει.
Click or tap any word for its parse and dictionary entry.
Text: Perseus Digital Library, licensed CC BY-SA. Dictionary: Liddell, Scott & Jones (Perseus, CC BY-SA). Morphology: odyCy — machine parsing, corrected against the AGDT & PROIEL treebanks and Morpheus.
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