The Naupactia is a lost epic poem

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

 of ancient Greek literature

Greek literature

Greek literature refers to writings composed in areas of Greek influence, typically though not necessarily in one of the Greek dialects, throughout the whole period in which the Greek-speaking people have existed.-Ancient Greek literature :...

. In antiquity the title was also written Naupaktika (Latin Naupactica), and it is also in the present day sometimes referred to among scholars by the Latin phrase carmen Naupactium ("Naupactian poem"). Naupactus

Naupactus

Naupactus or Nafpaktos , is a town and a former municipality in Aetolia-Acarnania, West Greece, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Nafpaktia, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit...

 is a city in Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

 on the Corinthian Gulf.

The Naupactia was probably composed in the 6th or 5th century BCE. Its authorship is uncertain: most ancient writers simply refer to "the author of the Naupactia". The 2nd-century CE travelogue

Travel literature

Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...

 writer Pausanias

Pausanias (geographer)

Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observations, and is a crucial link between classical...

 records that most people in his time considered that it was by an anonymous Milesian

Miletus

Miletus was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia , near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria...

 poet, but he himself judges that it was most likely by Carcinus of Naupactus; Pausanias' reasoning is open to doubt.

It is not known how long the poem was. In current critical editions, only ten lines of the poem's text survive. Pausanias records that the poem was "written about women"; fewer than a dozen other fragmentary references give indications as to the content, but they tend to suggest that the content was largely genealogical. These two facts combined suggest similarities with the pseudo-Hesiodic poem the Catalogue of Women. More than half of the surviving fragments are devoted to the heroic story of the Argonauts: it is likely that this occupied a large proportion of the poem, and probably influenced later poetic accounts of the story such as Pindar

Pindar

Pindar , was an Ancient Greek lyric poet. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian described him as "by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich...

's fourth Pythian ode, and the best-known version, Apollonius

Apollonius of Rhodes

Apollonius Rhodius, also known as Apollonius of Rhodes , early 3rd century BCE – after 246 BCE, was a poet, and a librarian at the Library of Alexandria...

' Argonautica.

Editions

• No e-texts of the Naupaktia fragments are available.
• Printed editions (Greek):
  • A. Bernabé 1987, Poetarum epicorum Graecorum testimonia et fragmenta pt. 1 (Leipzig: Teubner)
  • M. Davies 1988, Epicorum Graecorum fragmenta (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht)
• Printed editions (Greek with English translation):
  • M.L. West 2003, Greek Epic Fragments (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
    Harvard University Press
    Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...
    
    )