NEW POETIC FRAGMENTS FROM A NEGLECTED WITNESS OF PS.-TRYPHO'SDE TROPIS: CALLIMACHUS, PS.-HESIOD, PS.-SIMONIDES

Abstract

AbstractA treatise on rhetorical tropes is attributed in manuscripts to the first-century grammarian Trypho: this article considers for the first time a fifteenth-century manuscript of this work (Leiden, BPG 74G), which turns out to be the only complete witness of its hitherto unknown original version; this version (very fragmentarily transmitted by a fifth-century papyrus scrap) is also partly found in another fifteenth-century manuscript now kept in Olomouc (M 79). Four interesting poetic fragments are quoted in this newly discovered, fuller version of Ps.-Trypho'sDe Tropis: some lines from Callimachus’ fifth and fourthIambi(23–9 and 90–2 respectively: a radically new light is shed by this new witness on the parallel papyrus fragments carrying Callimachus’ text), an epigram dubiously attributed to Simonides (FGE44 Page, probably to be dated to the Hellenistic period: the text can be now restored to its complete form), and some enigmatic lines of “Hesiod”'sWedding of Keyx, which the new witness finally makes fully understandable.