Primary Sources in the Original Languages
Ancient Texts
The Ancient Texts library gathers primary sources that stand directly behind the music and historical storytelling of 38th Scroll. Each entry presents original-language material, translation or close textual commentary, historical context, and a link back to the composition it helps illuminate.
The archive is intentionally selective rather than encyclopedic: it focuses on passages where reading the ancient text materially changes how the modern song or visual narrative can be understood.
Greek Poetry & Drama
Archilochus · Fragment 5 West
The Abandoned Shield
A lost shield, a surviving speaker, and one of archaic poetry’s sharpest reversals of martial shame.
Related composition: The Hedgehog’s Oath →
Read the text →Homer · Iliad 6.466–481
Hector, Astyanax and the Prayer
Astyanax recoils from Hector’s helmet; Hector removes it, embraces his son, and prays for his heroic future.
Related composition: Astyanax →
Read the text →Homer · Iliad 16.818–857
Patroclus, Hector and the Prophecy
Hector delivers the fatal blow to the already wounded Patroclus, whose last words foretell Hector’s death.
Related composition: Astyanax →
Read the text →Homer · Iliad 22.361–404
Hector’s Death and the Dragging
Hector dies before Troy and Achilles binds the body to his chariot, exposing the city after its defender falls.
Related composition: Astyanax →
Read the text →Sophocles · Antigone 450–460
The Unwritten Laws
Antigone appeals to divine ordinances she calls unwritten, unfailing, and older than any mortal decree.
Related composition: Sacred Mask →
Read the text →Sophocles · Antigone 499–525
Love, Kinship and the Dead
Creon names Polynices an enemy; Antigone answers through brotherhood, Hades, and her refusal to share in hatred.
Related composition: Sacred Mask →
Read the text →Hesiod · Theogony 561–569
Prometheus Steals Fire
Zeus withholds fire and Prometheus steals its far-seen gleam inside a hollow fennel stalk.
Related composition: Forged in Earth →
Read the text →Prometheus Bound · 442–506
The Arts Given to Humanity
Prometheus claims writing, number, astronomy, navigation, medicine, divination, metalworking, and the resources hidden in earth.
Related composition: Forged in Earth →
Read the text →Homer · Odyssey 8.492–520
The Wooden Horse and the Sack of Troy
Epeius makes the Horse with Athena; Odysseus brings the stratagem into Troy and the hidden Achaeans sack the city.
Related composition: The Ship Remembers →
Read the text →Homer · Odyssey 9.526–535
Polyphemus’ Curse
After Odysseus gives his name, Polyphemus asks Poseidon to ruin or delay his homecoming.
Related composition: The Ship Remembers →
Read the text →Homer · Odyssey 12.403–425
Zeus Destroys the Last Ship
Zeus strikes the final vessel after the cattle of Helios, and the companions lose their homecoming.
Related composition: The Ship Remembers →
Read the text →Aristophanes · Lysistrata 486–499
The War Treasury
Lysistrata explains why the women seized the Acropolis: control the money and stop it financing war.
Related composition: Lysistrata →
Read the text →Aristophanes · Lysistrata 829–953
Cinesias and Myrrhine
Myrrhine turns Cinesias’ sexual desperation into an elaborate comic strategy for peace.
Related composition: Lysistrata →
Read the text →Pseudo-Homer · Batrachomyomachia 82–100, 294–303
The Drowning and Nightfall
A frog dives from a water-snake and leaves his mouse passenger to drown; later the crabs drive the mice into flight as the sun sets on the one-day battle.
Related composition: By Nightfall →
Read the text →Greek History & Prose
Polybius · Histories 8.6.2–4
Archimedes’ Iron Hand
Polybius describes a crane-and-chain device that seized Roman ships during the siege of Syracuse.
Related composition: Burning Mirrors →
Read the text →Plutarch · Marcellus 15–16
Archimedes Against the Roman Assault
A later Greek account of stones, missiles, iron hands, and crane-like machines turning the Roman assault into panic.
Related composition: Burning Mirrors →
Read the text →Greek Religious & Funerary Texts
Petelia · Gold Tablet
Memory and the Afterlife
A funerary guide directs the deceased toward the lake of Memory and supplies words of divine lineage.
Related composition: The Orphic Path →
Read the text →Pelinna · Gold Tablets
Death, Rebirth and Bacchios
A funerary formula declares death and rebirth, invokes Persephone and Bacchios, and promises a blessed post-mortem condition.
Related composition: The Orphic Path →
Read the text →Roman History & Politics
Appian · Civil Wars 2.101
Caesar’s Four Triumphs
A Greek-language account of Caesar’s triumphs of 46 BCE and the civil-war tensions that still haunted their imagery.
Related composition: The Serpent Crown →
Read the text →Hadrumetum · Roman Racing Defixiones
The Racing Curses of Hadrumetum
Surviving lead curses against charioteers and horses, including Blue-team targets and a Green driver named Archelaos.
Related composition: Prasina →
Read the text →Martial · Epigrams 10.50 and 10.53
Scorpus: The Circus and a Life Cut Short
Two Latin poems mourning the celebrated charioteer, with new translation and commentary on racing and mortality.
Related composition: Prasina →
Read the text →Suetonius · Domitian 7.1
The Gold and Purple Factions
Domitian adds two factions to the traditional four, creating the six-colour context of Prasina.
Related composition: Prasina →
Read the text →Polybius · Histories 3.54
The Alps as Italy’s Citadel
Hannibal shows his exhausted men Italy below the mountains, likened by Polybius to a citadel.
Related composition: The Citadel of Italy →
Read the text →Livy · History of Rome 21.35
The Walls and Citadel of Italy
Livy presents Hannibal urging his army beyond the Alpine walls toward Rome, the citadel and capital of Italy.
Related composition: The Citadel of Italy →
Read the text →Suetonius · Divus Julius 37
Five Triumphs and Veni, Vidi, Vici
Suetonius distinguishes Caesar’s four triumphs of 46 BCE from the later Spanish triumph and preserves the Pontic slogan.
Related composition: The Serpent Crown →
Read the text →Roman Poetry & Prose
Juvenal · Satire 10.77–81
Bread and Circuses
Juvenal’s famous compressed diagnosis of a Roman people exchanging political power for food and spectacle.
Related composition: Blood Circus →
Read the text →Seneca · Epistles 7.3–5
The Noon Spectacle
Seneca watches unprotected killings at the midday arena program and turns his disgust toward the spectators themselves.
Related composition: Blood Circus →
Read the text →Pliny · Natural History, Preface 13–18
Writing Everything Down
Pliny explains the scale, labour, sources, and purpose behind his enormous encyclopedic undertaking.
Related composition: Write It All Down →
Read the text →Pliny the Younger · Letters 6.16
Observation, Rescue and Death at Vesuvius
Selected passages trace Pliny the Elder from observation of the eruption to a rescue mission and his final collapse near Stabiae.
Related composition: Write It All Down →
Read the text →Ovid · Tristia 1.7.11–30
The Exiled Poet and His Books
Ovid addresses the fate of his poetry from exile and imagines how his works will survive without him in Rome.
Related composition: Metamorphosis →
Read the text →Ovid · Metamorphoses 15.871–879
I Shall Live
The Metamorphoses ends with Ovid claiming that death can take his body but not the poem, the name, or the voice future readers sustain.
Related composition: Metamorphosis →
Read the text →