5271. [Plutarch], De proverbiis Alexandrinorum 50 (?)

2021

To date, six fragments of Philo's corpus have been published from the excavations at Oxyrhynchus. Scholars who have worked on these fragments argue that they are from a single book, with most studies attempting to determine the size of the original codex, how many leaves it had, what texts it may have contained, and how the extant text contributes to refining our critical editions.1 These are all important endeavours and they have added substantially to our understanding of manuscript culture in antiquity. Little attention, however, has been given to the scribes of the fragments. This work is vital and necessary for our understanding of early readers and copiers of Philo's corpus.2 In what follows, I provide a detailed discussion of the three scribes who copied this codex, paying particular attention to non-textual features, such as sense-unit divisions, nomina sacra, page layout, and other sigla or marks, identifying common features and unique traits.3

1977

Archiv für …, 2008

2017

This article is an edition of a 5th century Greek private letter on papyrus, from a Christian context, sent from Alexandria. Written by a son to his mother through another person, the letter is typical of Christian Greek epistolography (Christian turns of phrase, judicial proceedings, food purchase, condolences, formulae valetudinis). It also mentions the St.-John's martyrium of Alexandria.

Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 186 (2013): 247-250.

Labored in Papyrus Leaves: Perspectives on an Epigram Collection Attributed to Posidippus, 2004

The earliest Greek poetry books come from the third century BCE, and surviving examples include Callimachus' Iambi and Aetia and Herodas' Mimiambi, known from papyrus, and a few manuscript possibilities, such as Callimachus' Hymns and portions ofTheocricus. Collections of epigrams were also among the earliest poetry books, and Meleager apparencly used these single-authored collections in compiling his Garland, which became the primary source for Hellenistic epigrams preserved in the later B yz antine anthologies. Up to chis point, however, direct evidence for epigram collections has been slight, consisting of a few papyrus scraps containing contiguous epigrams, ancient references to the Epi gr ammata of various poets, and a small sylloge of epigrams attributed to Theocritus chat descends in bucolic manu scripcs. 2 The new Posidippus papyrus now provides us with an epigram collection securely dated to the third century BCE. The editors point out, on the basis of the care given to the script and outlay of the text, chat chis papyrus was the product of a scriptorium, not a personal copy. They also recognize chat the arrangement of the poems was not just formal or convenient, but refi ned, aesthetically designed to appeal to a reading public. 3 One of the most surprising aspects of the papyrus is its division into sections, each with its own tide, placed within a column and centered. Nine such sections are clearly visible on the papyrus, and the editors believe chat a tench may be lurking in the scraps at the end of the surviving text. 4 The B yz antine anthologies are

Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 1988

How Hellenistic epigram arrived in Rome has been obscured of late by negligence. Yet the situation seemed clear enough early in this century; Friedrich Leo could write that Greek elegiac couplets were represented by the Satumian verses inscribed in the sepulcher of the Scipios: Leo's Geschichte der riimischen Literatur (1913) states that the elogia in Latin derive from the Greek usage of funerary epigram.2 Yet Leo's perception has been neglected recently. Authoritative studies of the Scipionic sepulcher from the standpoints of archaeology, topography and epigraphy all confuse the status of the e10gia.~ Nor has archaeology been more forgetful than some contemporary philology. Leo's point that the Scipionic satumians represent Greek form and function, in short, the Greek genre of epigram, does not figure, for example, in a recent attempt to reconstruct the history of epigram in republican Rome: an attempt that neglects the epigraphic record of the genre and even goes so far as to propound the existence of a purely native Roman tradition in epigram," in spite of the Greek origin and cultural implication of the very name, not to mention the problematic status of the idea of the 'purely native' at Rome, which Eduard Wolfflin, for example, had exposed as a scholarly and cultural myth.5 For the archaeologists, then, whose reinterpretation of the monument made my own studies possible, I have offered elsewhere a reminder that the elogia constitute a literary product that is a deliberate transplant of Greek genre into the Roman situation.'j At the same time, perplexed by the notion of 'native Roman tradition', I have argued in yet another study that the epigrams of republican Rome embraced a rather wide diversity of stylistic features, which they shared with Hellenistic Greek epigram, so that one might most accurately speak of a Hellenistic-Roman Vulgate, certainly not a purely native traditi~n.~ What remains then for the present is more detailed study of genre and style in the Scipionic elogia themselves, to reaffirm their linkage with Hellenistic epigram. Concerning the problem of genre at Rome, the remarks by Oswyn Murray in a recent Journal of Roman Studies provide an apt reminder and theoretical perspective: Parts of the following material were presented orally at the American Philological Association, the Brown University Classics Department, the Liverpool Latin Seminar and the summer school of the American Academy in Rome. In discussion at Liverpool, Otto Skutsch played an active and extremely helpful role. He also offered characteristically precise observations and corrections to a subsequent draft, though responsibility for the final version is my own. Bruno Gentili shared materials from his forthcoming collection of archaic Latin texts, and Nevio Zorzetti gave scholarly friendship in Rome and Trieste. * Leo, 1913, 45: 'das Grabgedicht aus dem griechischen Gebrauch aufgenommen ... in satumischen Versen an Stelle des elegischen griechischen Masses.' See articles cited by Van Sickle, AJP 108 (1987), 41ff. Ross, 1969, S.V. Pre-neoteric epigram. On p.13 we read that, apart from Aedituus, Licinus and Catulus, 'Our only other examples of pre-neoteric epigrams (CIL 4, 4966-73 [sc. the grafitti of Tiburtinus at Pompeii]) have been virtually ignored.' Neither the epigrams of Lucilius nor actual verse inscriptions get taken into account.