In Greek mythology, Nyx is the goddess and personification of the night. In Hesiod's Theogony, she is the offspring of Chaos, and the mother of Aether and Hemera (Day) by Erebus (Darkness). By herself, she produces a brood of children which are personifications of primarily negative forces. She features in a number of early cosmogonies, which place her as one of the first deities to exist. In the works of poets and playwrights, she lives at the ends of the Earth, and is often described as a black-robed goddess who drives through the sky in a chariot pulled by horses. In the Iliad, Homer relates that even Zeus fears to displease her.
Cratippus was a Greek historian. There are only three or four references to him in ancient literature, and his importance derives from him being identified by several scholars with the author of the historical fragment discovered by Grenfell and Hunt. The fragment itself was published in Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. v, and is known as the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. It may be regarded as a fairly certain inference from a passage in Plutarch that he was an Athenian writer, intermediate in date between Thucydides and Xenophon, and that his work continued the narrative of Thucydides, from the point at which the latter historian stopped down to the Battle of Cnidus.
Posidippus of Pella was an Ancient Greek epigrammatic poet.
Orphism is the name given to a set of religious beliefs and practices originating in Thrace and later spreading to the ancient Greek and Hellenistic world, associated with literature ascribed to the mythical Thracian poet Orpheus, who descended into the Greek underworld and returned. This type of journey is called a katabasis and is the basis of several hero worships and journeys. Orphics revered Dionysus and Persephone. Orphism has been described as a reform of the earlier Dionysian religion, involving a re-interpretation or re-reading of the myth of Dionysus and a re-ordering of Hesiod's Theogony, based in part on pre-Socratic philosophy.
In Greek mythology, Aether, Æther, Aither, or Ether is the personification of the bright upper sky. According to Hesiod, he was the son of Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx (Night), and the brother of Hemera (Day). In Orphic cosmogony Aether was the offspring of Chronos (Time), and the brother of Chaos and Erebus.
The Catalogue of Women —also known as the Ehoiai —is a fragmentary Greek epic poem that was attributed to Hesiod during antiquity. The "women" of the title were in fact heroines, many of whom lay with gods, bearing the heroes of Greek mythology to both divine and mortal paramours. In contrast with the focus upon narrative in the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, the Catalogue was structured around a vast system of genealogies stemming from these unions and, in M. L. West's appraisal, covered "the whole of the heroic age." Through the course of the poem's five books, these family trees were embellished with stories involving many of their members, and so the poem amounted to a compendium of heroic mythology in much the same way that the Hesiodic Theogony presents a systematic account of the Greek pantheon built upon divine genealogies.
The Cologne Mani-Codex is a minute parchment codex, dated on paleographical evidence to the fifth century CE, found near Asyut, Egypt; it contains a Greek text describing the life of Mani, the founder of the religion Manichaeism.
Martin Litchfield West, was a British philologist and classical scholar. In recognition of his contribution to scholarship, he was awarded the Order of Merit in 2014.
Artemidorus of Ephesus was a Greek geographer, who flourished around 100 BC. His work in eleven books is often quoted by Strabo. What is thought to be a possible fragment of his work is considered by some scholars to be a forgery.
Totenpass is a German term sometimes used for inscribed tablets or metal leaves found in burials primarily of those presumed to be initiates into Orphic, Dionysiac, and some ancient Egyptian and Semitic religions. The term may be understood in English as a "passport for the dead". The so-called Orphic gold tablets are perhaps the best-known example.
Papyrus 82, designated by 𝔓82, is an early copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Gospel of Luke. The surviving texts of Luke are verses 7:32-34,37-38. The manuscript paleographically had been assigned to the 4th century.
Papyrus 85, designated by 𝔓85, is an early copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Book of Revelation. The manuscript paleographically has been assigned to the 4th century.
Papyrus 86, designated by siglum 𝔓86, is an early copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew. The manuscript palaeographically has been assigned to the 4th century.
The so-called Alcestis Barcinonensis is a mythological poem of at least 124 Latin hexameters on the story of Alcestis dying for the sake of her husband Admetus, following by and large the play by Euripides. The poem has been written on four papyrus leaves dated to the second half of the fourth century on account of the handwriting, an early half-uncial with cursive elements, and inserted into a codex mixtus at some later point in time. The editio princeps has been published by the Catalan priest and papyrologist Ramon Roca-Puig on 18 October 1982. The papyrus leaves are now in the possession of the foundation Sant Lluc Evangelista founded by Roca-Puig and located in Barcelona.
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 7 is a papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. It was discovered by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt in 1897, and published in 1898. It dates to the third century AD. The papyrus is now in the British Library.
Richard Charles Murray Janko is an Anglo-American classical scholar and the Gerald F. Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan.
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 842 is a papyrus manuscript, written in Ancient Greek, discovered during the 1906 excavations in Oxyrhynchus in modern Egypt by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt. It contains a history of classic Greece for the years 396-395 BCE. Along with PSI XII 1304, it makes up the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia.
The Brothers Poem or Brothers Song is a series of lines of verse attributed to the archaic Greek poet Sappho, which had been lost since antiquity until being rediscovered in 2014. Most of its text, apart from its opening lines, survives. It is known only from a papyrus fragment, comprising one of a series of poems attributed to Sappho. It mentions two of her brothers, Charaxos and Larichos; the only known mention of their names in Sappho's writings, though they are known from other sources. These references, and aspects of the language and style, have been used to establish her authorship.
The Tithonus poem, also known as the old age poem or the New Sappho, is a poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho. It is part of fragment 58 in Eva-Maria Voigt's edition of Sappho. The poem is from Book IV of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry. It was first published in 1922, after a fragment of papyrus on which it was partially preserved was discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt; further papyrus fragments published in 2004 almost completed the poem, drawing international media attention. One of very few substantially complete works by Sappho, it deals with the effects of ageing. There is scholarly debate about where the poem ends, as four lines previously thought to have been part of the poem are not found on the 2004 papyrus.
The Philinna Papyrus is part of a collection of ancient Greek spells written in hexameter verse. Three spells are partially preserved on the papyrus. One is a cure for headache, one probably for a skin condition, and the purpose of the third spell is uncertain. Two fragments of the papyrus survive, in the collections of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and the Berlin State Museums.
