Mythographus Homericus

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Mythographus Homericus, known as the Homeric Mythographer, is the unknown author of a collection of Greek-myth stories. The tales survive in two manuscript traditions. In one, they appear among the Homeric scholia (the D-scholia) in Byzantine copies. In the other, a Berlin 3rd-century CE papyrus preserves the source text or a version based on it, confirming Mythographus’s text. Several fragmentary papyri, including four from Oxyrhynchus, date from the 1st to the 5th century CE and provide more evidence. Seventy-seven fragments related to Iliad 18–24 were published in 1995 as P. Oxy. LXI 4096. Unlike the D-scholia, where the original author is hidden among citations, the Oxyrhynchus papyri keep the text in its original format: they follow the Homeric text with headwords linking to the relevant line. Most entries are brief summaries of episodes, name etymologies, genealogies, or explanations of Homeric terms; they are not a grammarian’s gloss.