On Stephanus of Byzantium β 188: Βύβλος, βύβλος, and φιλύρα

The transmitted text of Stephanus β 188 l. 5 βύβλου τῆς φυλῆς τῆς Αἰγυπτίης is corrupt: βύβλου as genitivus materiae can stay but τῆς φυλῆς meaning ‘kind’, ‘variety’ is problematic. Pace Meineke, Aelius Dionysius’ gloss φιλύρα (φ 14 Erbse) was most likely not part of the original entry of Stephanus’ epitome but an addition of Eustathius; Meineke’s conjecture τῆς φιλύρης must be discarded and the text of Aelius Dionysius φ 14 should instead read φιλύρα· φυτὸν ἔχον φλοιὸν βύβλῳ ὅμοιον ἐξ οὗ τοὺς στεφάνους πλέκουσιν. The best option for an editor of the Ethnika is that of printing crux before τῆς φυλῆς and suggest diagnostic conjectures in the apparatus

Plato Laws 3.680B-C: Antisthenes, the Cyclopes and Homeric Exegesis

AbstractIn Laws 3.680b–c the Athenian Stranger's positive evaluation of the Cyclopean ‘way of life’ (Od. 9.112–15) is deeply indebted to Antisthenes’ interpretatio Homerica of the Cyclopes as ‘just’ insofar they do not have the need of written law. Antisthenes’ equation of ‘need of law’ with ‘need of written law’ is then contextualized within the unresolved tension, in the legislative project of the Laws, between oral dissemination (‘proems’ to the laws) and the potentially coercive power of the written text. Finally, Megillus’ inept reply to the Homeric quotation by the Athenian Stranger allows us to gain a more nuanced view of the ‘readerly’ dynamics enacted by the internal audience of the Laws.</jats:p

Text and Transmission

The modern reader may encounter the Greek text of Euripides' surviving plays in many forms: in print either in complete editions or in separate editions of single plays published with translations or commentaries or both, and in digital form at well-known sites on the internet. When Euripides composed his plays, he is most likely to have written on a papyrus roll, although for rough drafts of small sections he could have used wax tablets, loose papyrus sheets, or pottery sherds. Although the papyrus rolls and early codices give us intriguing glimpses of the text of the Euripides plays up the seventh century CE, the surviving complete plays depend on the medieval textual tradition. For Euripides as for Aeschylus and Sophocles, Alexandrian scholars collected texts of as many plays as they could, comparing their titles to those known from the didascalic records. About seventy plays of Euripides never reached the medieval manuscript tradition

Greek lyric Kunstsprache between pan-Hellenism and epichoric influence: two case-studies

The interconnectedness of two linguistic registers, the ‘vernacular’ and the ‘morethan- local’ or ‘pan-Hellenic’, is a well-known characteristic of the Kunstsprache of Greek lyric. The two case-studies considered in this paper, Pindar’s Olympian 1 and a roughly contemporary Boeotian stone-epigram of ‘local’ production (CEG 114) exemplify opposite poles within the spectrum of linguistic possibilities available to Greek archaic and classical poets and their audiences

Corinna PMG 655 (= P.Oxy. 2370) fr.1 l. 13 κόσμ[εισα λόγυ]ς: the alleged Boeotian athematic conjugation of the verba vocalia and Corinna’s Dichtersprache

0. Fr. 1 of P.Oxy. 2370 (= MP3 249; LDAB 573), published by Lobel in 1956, is so far the only papyrus fragment among those extant in Boeotian dialect1 whose authorship can be securely ascribed to Corinna thanks to the overlap with Heph. Ench. xvi p. 56 l. 20-p. 57 l. 4 C. Hephaestion here quotes what is now PMG 655 fr. 1 ll. 2-5 and 15 as examples of the variety of the polyschematic dimeters (glyconics) employed by Corinna.2 All the instances cited by the 2nd century AD grammarian are glyconics with final choriamb, with the first metron of ll. 2-5 and l. 15 realised respectively by ‿ ‿ _ ‿ _ ‿ and _ _ _ _ . Line 13 as supplemented by Page in his PMG edition is the following: [ἱώνγ᾽ἀρχ]αγὸν3 κόσμ[εισα λόγυ]