CLA260H1 Lecture Notes - Dyskolos, Euripides, Fragmente Der Griechischen Historiker
Document Summary
Oxyrhynchus: note in passing that most inscriptions (the subject of chapter 17 in the textbook) survive in a physically fragmentary state. Consider the example of menander (a comic poet of the later 4th century. Bce), who wrote more than 100 plays; all of them were lost in the 7th & 8th centuries ce. However, in other surviving works he was quoted over 900 times (often only a single line, but sometimes passages up to 16 lines long). Many papyri from hellenistic and roman egypt have also been discovered which contain parts of menander"s plays; one (dyskolos) is virtually complete, and there are substantial fractions of half a dozen more, along with many more shorter fragments. Usually however when we talk about fragments we mean quotations texts preserved in the works of later authors. of. An example, from athenaeus" deipnosophistai (a text written at the end of the 2nd century ce: this section (2. 38e) is part of a conversation about wine):
