Ebook: Poeti minori del dramma satiresco: testo critico, traduzione e commento

This revised doctoral thesis, defended at the University of Catania in 2001, adds an important handbook to serve the growing interest in satyr play. Das griechische Satyrspiel, Darmstadt 1999, ed. R. Krumeich, N. Pechstein and B. Seidensticker [henceforth GS] has, as Cipolla (henceforth CP) says, provided the “status quaestionis” on the subject, and CP’s own work, well underway when GS appeared, makes frequent and good use of it and the other standard reference works on satyr play and collections of dramatic fragments. Even though the ca. 77 fragments of the so-called lesser writers of satyr play amount to only a little over 300 lines (in contrast to some 450 lines of Sophocles’ Ichneutai alone), this critical edition with commentary is no mean accomplishment. It is especially reliable and useful for the following reasons: 1) its judgments are informed by thorough review of the scholarship on the manuscript tradition of Athenaeus (source of most of the fragments) and autopsy of the main manuscripts; 2) it gives a timely new text of the fragments and, unlike GS, of their contexts, with a translation of both; 3) there is an apparatus criticus of every fragment and the context of its source, and the commentary evaluates variant readings and emendations suggested by many scholars, including those since the appearance of TrGF 1 (whose texts are printed in GS); 4) the analysis and application of the meter of the texts is excellent. There are no illustrations, and for the evidence of vase-painting CP relies on GS (and Krumeich’s archaeological introduction, pp. 41-73).