A guard reports Cassandra's ravings to her father — and every line is a riddle: no god, hero, or city named plainly, only in glittering, twisting allusion. For two thousand years it has been called the darkest poem in Greek.
The opening — lines 1–34 — is glossed and free to read: the Greek with English under every word, transliteration on tap, and a lexicon a tap away. The rest is being pressed.
❦ Read the openingLycophron's Alexandra is a 1,474-line tour de force of deliberate obscurity — a messenger's verbatim report of the prophetess Cassandra foretelling the fall of Troy and the fates of its heroes, but almost never by their plain names. It is the ultimate puzzle-poem, prized for exactly the difficulty that has kept it out of most readers' hands.
An interlinear is the only honest way in: every Greek word in its own order, glossed word by word, with the tangle of allusion unwound beneath it. The opening (lines 1–34) is live and free to read — come see whether the darkest poem in Greek can, at last, simply be read.
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