Ancient Literacies

Table 10.3. (Continued)

Catalogue and
MP^3 Numbers

Date (allA.D.

unless noted) Contents Comments

Scribe, if

Known

28 .MP^3 1495 Late first Theocritus Corrections by
diorthotes.

A28

29. Parts of MP^3
    14456

Second Lyric, perhaps

Sappho

One marginal note.

30 .MP^3 1739 Second Satyr play Exegetic notes,
perhaps by the
original scribe.

A11

31 .MP^3 1321 Early second Hypotheseisof
comedies of
Menander
32 .MP^32195
recto

Late second Anonymous

work on Alexan

der the Great

Correction by
diorthotes.Onverso
is no. 33.
33 .MP^32127
verso

Second third Lexicon of rare

words

Mistakes, but no
corrections.
34 .MP^3 2070 Second Third Biographies
(Sappho, Si
monides, Aesop,
Thucydides,
Demosthenes,
and others)
35 .MP^3 2290 Early third Problems in
literary criticism^7

Corrections by

diorthotes.

Note: This concentration also included two single-sheet drafts of short works: a verse panegyric on the
gymnasiarch Theon, and a prose encomium on the fig (MP^3 1847 and MP^3 2527 respectively). The first
is probably the author’s own copy, because it contains erasures and corrections that appear to be those
of an author’s draft. Turner 1971, 90–1, no. 50, discusses the nature of this document. The erasures and
revisions are easily visible in the photograph he provides.

1. McNamee 2007, chapter 3, takes this text, in which text and annotations are by the same scribe, as
   ‘‘conceivably a copy used by [a] grammatical student or [his] teacher.’’


2. The surviving fragment comes from BacchylidesDithyramb17, but thesillybossimply says
   ‘‘Bacchylides, Dithyrambs,’’ so the volume presumably contained all of the dithyrambs.


3. For the date: Barron 1969, 119 with n. 3, citing E. G. Turner. It had been dated to the first century
   B.C. by Grenfell and Hunt.


4. This manuscript includesP.Oxy. 1604 andP.Oxy. 2445 frg. 1. For the assignment of this latter
   fragment to the manuscript represented byP.Oxy. 1604, see E. Lobel,ad P.Oxy. 2445.


5. The two Sophocles mss., nos. 25 and 26, were professionally prepared, as shown by the inclusion of
   stichometric counts in theIchneutae. The corrector was different from the original scribe, but the same
   for the two manuscripts. There were not many exegetic notes, if any, in what survives, and the notes
   seem aimed at providing a correct text, not elucidating Sophocles. The sources cited for alternate
   readings in no. 26 are The(on), Ar or Arn (possibly Aristophanes or Aristarchus), and N with a vertical
   stroke, perhaps for Nicanor.


6. Lobel and Page 1955, 25, distinguished a number of the lyric fragments that Grenfell and Hunt had
   published together asP.Oxy. 1231 as belonging to a separate manuscript. To my knowledge, Lobel and
   Page did not include the fragments within their text of Sappho and Alcaeus, so I have classed them
   simply as lyric, perhaps Sappho. The particular fragments, all of them very small, areP.Oxy. 1231
   (¼MP^3 1445) 24, 32–34, 37þ47, 39, 40, 46, and probably 8. What survives of a note is in frg. 33.


7. This work is not unlike a series of exegetic annotations. It takes up in turn a series of problems, such as
   obscure allusions, and elucidates them by reference to a wide range of authors in both poetry and prose.