In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the indirect tradition of classical works—the study of how texts have been transmitted through quotations, paraphrases, or summaries within broader works. Underlying this new wave of scholarship is a shift in focus: from the ‘quoted texts’—the fragments themselves—to the ‘quoting texts’—the works that preserve these fragments. Long regarded merely as repositories, ‘quoting texts’ are now increasingly examined as objects deserving of attention in their own right. The volume under review, which collects papers presented at a conference held in 2021 at the Akademie Meran, is representative of this more recent approach. It centers on three types of ‘quoting texts’ of ancient Greece: anthologies, lexica, and scholia.
The benefits of this new approach are briefly outlined by the editors in their introduction and can be appreciated throughout the volume. A more fine-grained understanding of ‘quoting texts’—both their transmission and compositional mechanics—enhances our interpretation of the fragments they preserve. At the same time, studying ‘quoting texts’ as products of specific educational and scholarly practices offers valuable insights into the broader cultural history of antiquity. A case in point is Elena Esposito’s study of the gloss for the verb ἀναρριχᾶσθαι, in a papyrus lexicon. The second-century CE anonymous lexicographer of P. Oxy. 17.2087 explains the verb using a quotation from Aristotle’s lost De Iustitia (missing in current editions). When compared with other lexicographical entries that explain the same verb, it becomes apparent that the anonymous omits a commonly cited parallel from Aristophanes’ Peace 70 and cites the form with a double ῥ, attested in contemporary language but not standard Attic. Thus, Esposito concludes that the papyrus reflects “a moderate and flexible approach to the language” contrasting with the purist, prescriptive tendencies of lexicographers like Phrynichus. Here, the study of lexica illuminates broader linguistic and cultural debates in the second century CE.
The first paper in the volume, by Richard Hunter, investigates the afterlife of Euripides’ Hippolytus (lines 73–87), the passage in which the play’s protagonist dedicates a garland to Artemis. This excerpt is included in Orion’s fifth-century anthology, while echoes and borrowings from it are attested in both pagan authors—such as the Hellenistic comic poet Skira and Plutarch—and later Christian poets, including John Mauropous and the author of the Christus Patiens in the eleventh century. Hunter’s study of the intricate web of allusions and reinterpretations of Hippolytus’ garland throughout antiquity vividly illustrates how much can be gleaned about ancient reading and writing practices when scholars attend to “how and in what contexts surviving literature is cited.”
In a volume on indirect tradition, a study of Stobaeus’ anthology—one of the most important sources of poetic fragments in antiquity—could not be omitted. After a brief introduction to Stobaeus, Christian Orth provides a statistical evaluation of the 675 comic quotations included in this florilegium.[1] Some results are expected. For example, given the gnomological character of New Comedy, it should come as no surprise that the poets of New Comedy (530 quotations) are more represented than those of Old (26 quotations) and Middle (119 quotations) Comedy. Other findings open interesting avenues for further research. For instance, as Orth shows, the variation in how work titles are introduced—some by a dative (with or without ἐν), others by a genitive (with or without ἐκ)—might help differentiate the sources from which Stobaeus drew his quotations, thereby enhancing our understanding of the composition and textual transmission of the anthology.
Elena Esposito’s paper opens the section on ancient lexica. Her analysis focuses on the significance of the earliest witnesses of lexicographical works preserved on papyri, both for understanding the transmission and comprehension of the ancient texts they preserve and for appreciating the broader cultural context in which they were composed (see the example discussed above). Particularly commendable is her analysis of the provenance of the fragmentary material, which—combined with a detailed study of the evidence—allows the author to extract a wealth of information from often minuscule scraps of papyri.
Olga Tribulato devotes her paper to quotations from comedy in two lexicographical works by the second-century author Phrynichus: the Eclogue and the Praeparatio Sophistica. In contrast to the more ecumenical stance of Pollux and the Antiatticist, Phrynichus considers only the playwrights of Old Comedy—specifically the classic triad of Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus—as valid sources for the study of Attic. Tribulato also signals differences between the Eclogue and the Praeparatio. The latter, unlike the former, includes quotations from a broader range of Old Comedy authors. When ‘minor’ Old comic writers are cited in the Praeparatio, Tribulato explains, it is usually to illustrate stylistic and semantic phenomena. When the goal is prescriptive language guidance, however, precedence is given to the usage of the poets of the Old Comic triad.
Giuseppe Ucciardello’s study of quotations in Byzantine lexica and school texts closes the section on Greek lexicography. Drawing on three case studies (‘Cyril’s lexicon’, the lexicon attributed to Eudemus, and Konstantinos Arabites’ Parekbolaion), he explores cases where poetic quotations are embedded in highly epitomized exegetical and grammatical contexts, complicating the identification of the fragments and their boundaries. Consider, for instance, his analysis of this passage from the Parekbolaion, in which the rare word ἀπαιόλη, “fraud”, appears:
22.19–21 N. οἱ δὲ ἀπολειφθέντες τῇ ἀπαιόλῃ τῆς δαιτὸς καὶ τοῦ κώμου, ἀλύοντες καὶ ἀδημονοῦντες ἐπὶ τῶν ἐκεῖσε τόπων διέτριβον.
and those who were deprived by fraud of the banquet and komos, spent time in those places perplexed and dismayed.
Only a thorough comparison with parallel material from other lexica and grammatical treatises (omitted here due to space), reveals that Konstantinos Arabites’ passage likely hides a reference to Aristophanes’ Nub.1150bis.
Scholia have always played a central role in the study of the ancient indirect tradition. As Lara Pagani notes in her paper on the scholia to the Iliad, they are “a tremendous source of indirect tradition from many points of view.” First, they preserve fragments of lost literature quoted to elucidate a given passage. Second, they serve as a source of indirect tradition regarding the work they interpret. Finally, scholiastic corpora result from a process of amalgamation and epitomization of various paraliterary works—such as ancient commentaries and treatises—which themselves are repositories of indirect tradition. Some of the challenges posed by identifying the processes behind the formation of scholiastic corpora are illustrated in this contribution. Pagani’s most puzzling example concerns a scholiastic note to Il. 1.29, in which Agamemnon tells Chryses that he will not release his daughter, Chryseis, “old age will catch her first.” Likely, some ancient readers found in Homer’s emphatic phraseology an opportunity to crack a joke at the poet’s expense: Will Agamemnon return Chryseis once she gets old? The scholium clarifies (with Pagani’s translation):
(τὴν δ’ ἐγὼ οὐ λύσω· πρίν μιν καὶ γῆρας ἔπεισιν:) καὶ οὐ τοῦτο δὲ λέγει, ὅτι γηράσασαν αὐτὴν τότε ἀποδώσει, ἀλλ’ ὅτι πρότερον γηράσει ἢ ἐκείνῳ ἀποδοθήσεται. A h(AgBdP M1P11W3)
(“I will not free her: old age will catch her first”): and he does not say that he will give her back, once she is old, but that she will get old rather than being set free by him.[2]
Erbse classified this as a scholion by Aristonicus, which in turn would mean it stemmed from Aristarchus. While Pagani does not deny that Aristarchus is the ultimate source of the scholium, she suggests that the passage reached manuscript A and the manuscripts of the h-class via the mediation of the scholia exegetica. This would explain the absence of the typical formal features traceable to Aristonicus like ἡ διπλῆ ὅτι, or ὅτι at the beginning of the lemma. Since, however, in the manuscripts that preserve it, this scholium is presented as a continuation of schol. ex. Il.1.26a E., I find it more likely that these Aristonicean features were suppressed as a result of the merging of our passage with the exegetical scholium to Il. 1.26a.
Filippomaria Pontani, who has embarked on the cyclopean task of re-editing the scholia to the Odyssey, offers a broad picture of some of the issues posed by dealing with indirect tradition in this corpus. In the last of his five case studies, he shows how the T-scholium to Odyssey 10.493 “presents a unique witness to a peculiar version of Teiresias’ myth:” Teiresias was originally a girl, was raped by Apollo, and then changed into a man by the god. While this version of the story also appears in Eustathios of Thessalonica, who is, in turn, dependent upon the plot of an alleged poem by the Hellenistic poet Sostratos, Pontani cautiously but convincingly argues that the scholium “may reflect a secondary yet ancient strand of mythographical lore about the character of Teiresias.”
In his dense and thoroughly researched contribution, Andreas Willi studies intertextuality in the scholia to Aristophanes, a topic that has so far received very little attention. He shows that while ancient interpreters put much zeal into detecting Aristophanic borrowings from other poets, they did so mostly with a view to discussing grammatical, lexical, or prosopographical matters, with evaluations of Aristophanes’ allusions from a literary perspective being extremely rare. I wonder if this state of affairs can be explained by the fact that the materials from which the scholia drew might have been composed with a view to serving a preliminary and more diagnostic phase of exegesis, while the exploration of broader literary questions was deferred to oral discussions and/or other scholarly avenues. A small quibble: I am not convinced that the reference to a ὑπόμνημα on Aristophanes’ Plutus composed by the third/second-century BCE scholar Euphronius suggests that “the novel format of writing scholarly commentaries […] may have been tried out first in the context of comic scholarship.” Other pieces of evidence, such as Diogenes Laertius’ mention of ὑπομνήματα composed by the third-century philosopher Crantor (D.L. IV.5.24) and the Lille Papyrus of Callimachus, point to the fact that around the time of Euphronius, if not before, commentaries were also composed on texts other than comedies.
The last contribution, by Monica Berti, focuses on digital practices for studying the indirect tradition. The digital environment opens new possibilities that can radically change the way we conceive of the indirect tradition. As Berti notes, the very term, fragmentum, strongly depends on the technology of the printed book. The digitization of ancient texts, on the other hand, allows us to “reconceptualize” textual fragments “as a group of linguistic elements that reveal the presence of textual reuses and which can be therefore analyzed and annotated within the context of their transmission.” A good example is the ongoing Digital Athenaeus project, a digital version of Kaibel’s text of the Deipnosophistai. The Digital Athenaeus allows for “the extraction, analysis, interpretation and annotation of information about authors and works preserved by the Naucratites.” One of the first results of the project has been the creation of online databases, such as the Named Entities Digger, and the Named Entities Concordances, which are exciting new tools for the study of the indirect tradition in Athenaeus.
This volume is well-produced and includes papers of very high scholarly quality. It will be of particular use to scholars interested in the study of indirect tradition and ancient fragmentary texts, as it ranges across many historical periods to provides a broad coverage of some of the main repositories of fragmentary literature in the Greek world and approaches the matter through various, and often new, points of view. Overall, this publication lays the groundwork for more synthetic explorations of the history and theory of quotations in ancient literature—a type of study that remains a desideratum.
Authors and titles
Introduction (Federico Favi and Virginia Mastellari)
The Afterlife of Hippolytus’ Garland (Richard Hunter)
Comic Quotations in Stobaeus (Christian Orth)
The Contribution of Greek Papyrus Lexica to the Tradition and Understanding of Ancient Texts (Elena Esposito)
“Aristophanes with his Chorus”: Citations and Uses of Comedy in the Lexica of Phrynichus Atticista (Olga Tribulato)
Hidden Quotations and Epitomized Entries in Byzantine Lexica and School‑texts: Three Case Studies (Giuseppe Ucciardello)
The Scholia to the Iliad as (a Source of) Indirect Tradition (Lara Pagani)
Indirect Tradition in the Scholia to the Odyssey: Five Snapshots (Filippomaria Pontani)
Contextualizing Comedy: Assumptions of Intertextuality in the Aristophanic Scholia (Andreas Willi)
Digital Practice for Studying the Indirect Transmission of Classical Authors and Works (Monica Berti)
Notes
[1] It should be noted that Orth could not rely on the now-indispensable T. Dorandi, Stobaeana, 2023, the prolegomena to his ongoing edition of Stobaeus’ anthology, the first two books of which are expected to be released in July 2025.
[2] I think it would be better to translate as “she will get old before she will be set free by him” or, alternatively, “she will get old before she will be returned to him [i.e. Chryses].”