4304. COMEDY

An upper margin of 5.5 cm, and a small to medium-sized formal upright mixed hand of practised (though not ostentatious) elegance are signs that these remains of fifteen comic iambics come from a roll of some bibliographical pretensions. The back is blank. The handwriting may be assigned to the later second or early third century AD, in the context represented by Roberts, GLH nos 19a-c, and discussed by Turner, GMAW² 22 f., apropos of the British Museum papyrus of Bacchylides (Plond 733); Roberts 20a, the Plato, Phaedrus, published as 1016, looks to be later, and a date for it later than the first third of the third century is now to be considered from evidence quoted in GMAW² under no. 84. There is a sheet join about 1 cm from the right edge.

It is a pity that the writing is somewhat obscured by abrasion and damage. epsilon, theta, omicron, sigma are typically small and narrow, and eta, nu, pi typically broad; the angle of the pen, at about 45 degrees, shows clearly in the pointed triangulation of alpha and delta, the prominent arms of kappa and the sharply angular base of beta; rho has a small high loop, and phi a flattened centre. Punctuation by single point is found at some line ends; there are no other lectional signs, nor any corrections.

The lines are identifiable as iambics because the resolutions in 2 and 4, in close succession, effectively eliminate the chance of their being trochaic, the so-called ‘dactylic’ pattern of resolution in trochaics being extraordinarily rare throughout Attic Comedy.Individual instances remain debatable, but with hardly more than ten or a dozen in all Attic Comedy, the chances of finding two so close are negligible; the control case is the Sicilian Doric dramatist Epicharmus, whose trochaic tetrameters have no such inhibitions. See Sandbach on Menander, Dysk. 774 and Sik. 135; Handley, Dyskolos of Menander 71 f. (now dated in part), with further references; and E. Wüst, RhM 91 (1950) at pp. 343-6 (also dated, but still usable). Hard though it is to be confident over a short and broken passage like this, the frequent end-stopping, marked by a punctuation at 6, 8, 10, 11 and 12, and perhaps at 3 and 9 also, and the lack of any sign of strong internal pause or of part-division, make one think that the fragment is part of a continuous speech, and one written in a less flexible style of verse than is characteristic of Menander. The Old Attic imperfect syne was holding together in 3 (if that is what it is) would likewise be a surprise in Menander; but tychon perhaps, if present in 9, and gn- for gign- in 13 (once again irritatingly ambiguous), would be equally odd in a comedy of Aristophanes’ time, and point us back again towards the fourth century. These observations, though they prove nothing, may still serve to keep the mind open to the thought that we may have to do with that rarity, a papyrus fragment of a play of pre-Menandrian comedy, such as 427, a scrap assigned to the third century AD from the end of a roll containing Antiphanes, Anthropogonia (fr. 34 KA). That would be consistent with the content, in so far as it gives any clues; but the problems of being precise enough about that recall those of 3540, assigned to the first century, a fragment of a speech which was considered in relation to Aristophanes, Second