I. COMEDY

4301. OLD COMEDY

49 5B.99/D(37–38)a                                       8 × 6 cm                                       First/second century

Two scraps written in an elegant decorated hand of the ‘Roman Uncial’ type, to be compared with PSI XI 1213 and assigned to the late first or earlier second century AD. On fr. 1 the left-hand margin survives to 2 cm. Punctuation by paragraphos a horizontal stroke in the margin indicating a change of speaker (paler ink, probably a second hand). The back is blank.

Fr. 1.5 mentions a Kleonymos. Various Kleonymoi are known from literary sources (and LGPN Lexicon of Greek Personal Names II 268 records a sprinkle of Athenian private citizens); but since the remains suggest iambics, and dialogue, we should probably look to Old Comedy and to the podgy run-away lampooned by Aristophanes and Eupolis (see MacDowell on Wasps 19). The context provides possibly political elements: fr. 1.4 hetairon companion/associate, 6 graphaion of indictments, 8 perhaps a form of prodidonai to betray. Too little survives to determine whether we have trimeters (dialogue), or catalectic tetrameters (agon).

A more precise possibility should be mentioned. The hand of these fragments is not just similar, but very similar, to that of PSI 1213, although that is more heavily inked; and the size of the letters and the spacing of the lines seem to make a good match.¹ It will be worth considering whether 4301 comes from the same roll, or the same scribe, as PSI 1213. Note that PSI 1213 was found at Oxyrhynchus by Breccia; there are other cases in which Grenfell and Hunt, and Breccia, in successive excavations, recovered fragments of the same manuscript (e.g. III 454 and PSI II 119; XXXII 2639 and PSI XI 1191) or of different manuscripts in the same hand (J. Krüger, Oxyrhynchos in der Kaiserzeit Oxyrhynchus in the Imperial Period (1990) 193–5).

PSI 1213 too contains Old Comedy: lines from Eupolis, Prospaltioi (fr. 260 KA). This play dates from 429 (I. C. Storey, Phoenix 44 (1990) 14 f.). If 4301 belongs to it, this would be the earliest mention of Kleonymos: his career as a butt runs from Acharnians (425) to Birds (414), his political career from 426/5 to 415, see I. C. Storey, RhM 132 (1989) 247–61. Eupolis certainly referred to Kleonymos as a run-away (fr. 352), but we do not know in which play. Scholars have argued that since the shield joke appears in Knights, but not in Acharnians, it must refer to an incident of 425 (Storey 250 f.), in which case fr. 352 cannot belong to Prospaltioi. But the argument is clearly insecure.

¹ Of the published photographs of PSI 1213, that in Norsa, Scrittura letteraria greca Greek Literary Script pl. 9(a) seems to reproduce the actual size. I am grateful to Mr N. Gonis for measuring the original. He reports that the paragraphoi of PSI 1213, like those of 4301, are in a slightly greyer ink.