COMEDY

19 Below the beginning, stripped fibres; a paragraph may or may not have been written. End, high stop rather than damaged dicolon.

20 "O utterly wicked man, are you fighting with me now?" Cf. CGFPR 230.18; Menander, Misoumenos 132 "you fight with me, wretch?"

21 poiēs . [, the trace would allow omicron or omega. "I shall do nothing"? Or if ]is in 22 represents a verb, "as not being about to do nothing, Aischron, obviously, ... into this?"

22 Mette reconstructed the marginal note thus: "just like the [spear]. For that, brandished [causes fear]" we could then supply a verb to mean 'causes fear' or the like. This depends on recognising a form of episeio to brandish/shake at, and in that the decipherment looks plausible. Two oddities remain: gamma, which would normally represent gēn earth or gōn angle, must be taken as gar for (normally gamma with an accent) or indeed goun at least (elsewhere g-o); the ink after the looks like a raised vertical (iota?), again an unusual form of abbreviation. The note presumably refers to the text on its left. Nothing that survives looks in need of explanation; therefore the difficulty must have occurred in the lacuna. Did the text have "brandish this at me," or better a synonym, say "you threaten," which the comment explains as a metaphor from spear-throwing?

C. F. L. AUSTIN—E. W. HANDLEY—P. J. PARSONS

4303. NEW COMEDY, ?MENANDER

29 4B.44/E(1-2)a

7.5 x 9.8 cm

Third century

Written along the fibres in a brisk, good-sized Severe Style. The back is blank. Surviving upper margin of 2.5 cm. Elision marks, diaeresis; diastole in 3; no dicola visible. A correction in 7 (the ink suggests a second hand).

8–9 preserve a version of the formula which introduces the choral interlude at the end of act I in various plays of Menander; the ink surviving in 10 should probably be interpreted as a decorative flourish above a large and widely spaced X O R O U of the chorus. This naturally suggests Menander, unless the same wording was used by other New Comedy poets.

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	]thot . . [ . . . . ] . si anētō[
	]une . [ . . ] . . . . geist[
	]nou . . . . issouthat'tonth[
	] . oi . . [ . . . ] . kai badiz'o[
5	]ōd' . . . . n . rosagora[
	]tēn id . nē proeipein[
	]ell . . . . i prosumasau . [
	]i onta sathrous horōtin[
	] . eun kairon einai mo[
10	] . [ ] . [

A small decorative flourish is placed underneath line 10, indicating where the choral interlude marker 'OF THE CHORUS' would be.

1 ]th, no elision mark visible . [, oblique foot at line-level?, foot of long descender ] . , nu? or alpha iota,
l i? i., g? or part of t?

2 epsilon., point at line-level
3 see commentary
4 ] . , remains of