This engaging and challenging volume brings together several speeches held at the Academy of German studies in Merano, Italy, in 2019 and puts forward different approaches, though in a rather homogeneous fashion, on common pitfalls and methodologies facing fragmentary texts. In this respect, the English title Fragments in Context seems to be perfectly fitting, whereas the Italian subtitle Frammenti e dintorni gives a confusing rendering of ‘context’, a technical term of literary theory, as ‘thereabouts’, a colloquial and generic term.
What appears to be the main thrust of Patrick Finglass’ initial contribution (13–22) is his methodological interest in establishing a ‘code of conduct’ for future curators of fragment editions, so as to identify a set of principles on how to determine the parts of context relevant to a full understanding of the fragment, and why the primary author chose the particular citation. In contrast to some editors, notably of Stesichorus, who tend to minimize the context or limit its visibility on the one hand and to hypothesize a theoretically limitless scope thereof on the other, Finglass touches upon a point that will become a useful signpost throughout this volume: namely to underline the aporetic aspect of any hypothesis in regard to a given fragment, emphasizing at the same time the utmost restraint regarding its reconstruction, which may be often just described as exempli gratia. The risk being, as the author jokingly admits, to become ‘no longer an editor but an artist in [one’s] own right’ (22).
Franco Montanari’s paper (23–38) has far-reaching implications in regard to the necessity, methodologically speaking, of deepening the historical-cultural meaning of the praxis of citation in literary erudition. Studying citations in their own context, which to us are fragments, becomes a way to shed some light on key procedures that turn citations into exegetical tools or informative and erudite support, by the same token illustrating the path of classical philology. Drawing a general frame of great complexity and enormous importance, Montanari points the way to further research by presenting some fragments of Old Comedy from the Iliad’s scholia.
The volume goes on with a series of contributions focusing in particular on some processes of textual corruption identifiable at different levels within the framework of indirect tradition.
Renzo Tosi (39–47) maps the guidelines of citation in the great corpus of lexicography, distinguishing between different phases of lemmatization and interpretamentum, as well as illustrating how the incessant flow of material from one lexicon to the next and related processes of epitomization lie at the very root of uneven exegetical quality or citational incoherence.
Elisabetta Lupi (189–210), by examining problematic contours of Timaeus fr. 50 within the colloquial framework of Deipnosophists by Athenaeus (519b–520c), highlights a similar problematic distinction between the author’s citation, direct or indirect, and conceptual nuclei of fluctuating temporal and cultural attribution (in this case, Sybaritic luxury). A different delimitation of the fragment could lend itself to a different understanding of the citation context, keeping in mind a stream of literary tradition on Sybaris in the Severan period.
Federico Favi (69–97) offers a selection of diachronic as well as diatopic distribution of rare linguistic forms in Epicharmus that find some parallel only in later texts, occasionally only within koiné; rather than koineisms or dialecticisms, such forms could be seen as colloquial structures, not rigidly identifiable in space and time and not even limited to specific distortions such as, for example, in parody.
Ioannis Kostantakos’ far-reaching work (99–144) examines the development of Märchenkomödie through his examination of vase painting as well as a few surviving fragments, particularly those related to talking and humanized animals.
Further work takes into consideration more specific phenomena: Eric Csapo (49–67) inquires into a theatrical event, such as the cancellation of a performance of Menander’s Imbrioi, which may not have been caused by censorship on ideological or thematic grounds, as may be inferred from a papyrus hypothesis, but rather by a scheduling rearrangement following Demetrius Poliorketes’ choreographic arrival in Athens in 295 BC.
Irmgard Männlein-Robert (211–28), examining citations from Porphyry’s On Statues in the Evangelical Preparation by Eusebius of Caesarea, provides evidence of the process of decontextualization and manipulation to which the Greek philosophical tradition is subjected by Christian apologetic writers.
An interesting experiment of textual reconstruction is offered by Antonis Petrides (163–87), who integrates the exegesis of scanty fragments of Menander’s Leukadia (a lost play relating Sappho’s love story with Phaon) with interpretation of a mosaic in the House of Menander in Mytilene as well as 19 fragments of the Leucadia by the Latin poet Sextus Turpilius, likely to be a Menandrean remake. The clues suggested by the three sources, subdivided into ‘Space’, ‘Dramatis personae’ and ‘Plotlines’, despite being thoroughly cross-examined and combined, do not seem to add up to a specific profile: tenuous smoking gun evidence seems broadly to reproduce the plots of the New Comedy and related foregone themes such as amorous intrigues, unhappy endings and so forth.
Angela Andrisano’s contribution (145–62) stands out as rather eccentric in respect to different but coherent interpretative strategies present in the volume: in re-examining Aristophanes’ poetic controversy with the dithyrambographer Kinesias, she seems to impart a metaphoric hue to the term ‘fragment’ as part of any other more complex reality: ‘Aristophanes’ biting jokes should represent fragments of difficult reading and interpretation’ (145).
Overall, this book’s main contribution is refining a methodological approach to fragmentary texts and establishing some guidelines which philologists must adhere to regarding textual exegesis and reconstruction.
