P.Oxy. 4951: una nuova lettura

Abstract

P.Oxy. 4951: a new reading.

The article offers a new reading of P.Oxy. 4951, a fragment of papyruspublished in the 73th volume of the Oxyrhyncus Papyri (2009) by H.-C.Günther. The fragment, dated to the first century AD, preserves twentythreelines of the upper part of a column and probably contains a commentary,as can be inferred from some features of the text, notably the spatia vacua and the dicola that separate the lemmata from the exegeticalparts. The main interest of the article lies on the first lines, which containthe remains of a comment on a lost lemma: a quote from Homer followedby a glossa explaining one of the words cited. The focus of the discussionis the identification in this section of a dicolon, proposed in the editioprinceps, which is here brought into question: the position of the allegeddicolon, here not separating a lemma from an exegetical part, and someof its physical characteristics lead to think that the two visible pointsshould be interpreted as two spots of the papyrus rather than as a diacriticalsign. This permits to identify a new word used to explain the verse ofHomer, different and certainly not less convincing than the one suggestedby the editor princeps in terms of tradition: a reconstruction of the historyof this glossa is in fact proposed, stretching from Alexandrian commentariesto the glossaries of Late Antiquity.
luca_sardelli@virgilio.it