P.Oxy. IV 700: uno strano caso di accordo in errore con il cod.S? Prolepsis' Second International Postgraduate Conference «Auctor est aequivocum»: Authenticity, Authority and Authorship from the Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages (original) (raw)
Demosthenes’ On the Crown oration was a masterpiece in Antiquity. This success is testified by the great number of findings. I have notice of 30 papyri containing passages from this work. The enquiry of these specimina and their lessons could be useful in order to reconstruct the demosthenic text, the origin and nature of the public documents quoted, the circulation of this oration in ancient world. Another interesting point is the relation between these papyri and the medieval manuscripts. Usually, no medieval codex is a perfect representative of an ancient line of transmission, as cross-contamination intervened during both ancient times and Middle Ages. From this point of view, P.Oxy. IV 700 gives us many interesting cases of reflection. This specimen, dated II-III century AD, contains §§ 17-19, but it’s incomplete and fragmentary. The integration of gaps sometimes is difficult, above all at lines 22-23, where the text is shorter than the one attested in the medieval witnesses. Moreover, with reference to this passage, probably the same hand added a textual integration on the lower margin (Ἕλληϲι). This entry seems the same which recurs on the upper margin of page 159 verso of S codex (Paris.gr. 2934), the oldest medieval manuscript of Demosthenes. We are dealing with a particular case of conjunctive error? The situation could be, perhaps, more complex. The paradigmatic and difficult case of this papyrus compels us to search a right scientific method to use, in order to critically reconstruct the text. We have to ask ourselves if in the S codex too the addition of Ἕλληϲι on the margin could be the result of a simple omission. We have to reconsider reasons why the most part of critical editors have ever preferred thinking of Ἕλληϲι like an interlinear note that should be eliminated. This idea derives surely from the authority of codex S that, despite its excellence, should be released from the reductive etiquette of codex optimus.
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The library of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, the only ancient library which has survived into the modern era, preserves a unique heritage of philosophical texts not transmitted by the medieval tradition. It contains more than 1800 papyri carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and brought to light during the Bourbon excavations in the 18th century. During the eruption, many rolls were seriously damaged or broken in several pieces: each part of the same roll has been stored – and in some cases opened – separately from the others. This is one of the reasons why in the Officina dei Papiri in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Naples it is possible to find fragments stored with a different inventory number which belong to the same original roll. PHerc. 89/1383 is a case of this kind: as Gianluca Del Mastro has recently discovered, these two papyri are respectively the upper and the lower part of the same roll, broken roughly in the middle. A systematic study of both papyri – that remain so far unpublished due to their poor state of conservation – is required to determine the correct order of the fragments in the roll and to examine the content of the work. Actually, due to its carbonized state, during the unrolling different layers of papyrus remained attached to each other: this makes it necessary to distinguish sovrapposti and sottoposti (pieces layered above or below) from the main layer in order to virtually place them in their original position in the roll. This speech aims to show some preliminary results of the work in progress on this new text, in which a new reading of the final subscriptio confirms that the author is the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara. Thanks to an accurate stratigraphical analysis of the fragments, some textual sequences are now readable and they will be able to clarify the theological argument of the treatise, by revealing important points of contact with the other religious works by Philodemus.
H. Cadell, W. Clarysse, and K. Robic, Papyrus de la Sorbonne (P.Sorb. III nos. 70–144)
Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists , 2013
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The Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2009
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