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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
In the first chapter of my book Tradition and Originality in Plautus: Studies of the Amatory Motifs in Plautine Comedy, I have expressed the view that mythological hyperboles in which the Comic character asserts his superiority in one respect or another to a mythological hero, far from being a product of Plautus' own imagination, as suggested by E. Fraenkel, are a specifically Greek element, adapted by Plautus from his originals. Here I should like to draw attention to one particular aspect of the pattern of thought in question, not dealt with in my book, which reinforces my argument and further underlines the traditional framework of which this pattern forms part.
1 Hypomnemata 62 (Göttingen, 1980)Google Scholar.
2 Plautinisches im Plautus (Berlin, 1922)Google Scholar, Ch. I (= Elementi plautini in Plauto, trsl. by Munari, F.; Firenze, 1960Google Scholar).
3 Kirk, G. S., The Iliad: a Commentary (Cambridge, 1985), i. 216CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Line 223 may be regarded as an inversion of the mythological hyperboles in question. See also Davies, M., Hermes 113 (1985), 247–9Google Scholar.
5 For a recent discussion of the Sophoclean passage see Davies, M., CQ 34 (1984), 480–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Ex. 1: ὑπερβάλλειν, Ex. 2: νικησέμεν. See next note.
7 Treated by Fraenkel as a criterion of Plautine originality (ibid). On this question see Zagagi, op. cit. 16, 28, 38ff., 46ff., 50. For ὐπερβάλειν see op. cit. 39, 49, 60 n. 139; for νικ⋯ν, 47f.