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Dieuchidas of Megara

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

J. A. Davison
Affiliation:
University of Leeds

Extract

It is immediately evident that the second sentence in this passage is incomplete; as it stands is fails to tell us what it was that Dieuchidas said execept in so far as it implies some connexion between either Solon of Peisistratus and the lines which we now reat at Iliad 2.558 ff. Many scholars have striven to fill the lacuna in accordance with their own views of what Dieuchidas ought to have written, and some have sought to use the resulting text as a substantive argument for Dieuchidas' knowledge of the so-called ‘Peisistratean recension’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1959

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References

page 216 note 1 For example, Ritschl (quoted with approval by Wilamowitz, , Homerische Untersuchungen [1884], p. 240Google Scholar): … Leaf, Iliad i2 (1900), xviii, who preferred to supply Jacoby, F., Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, No. 485 F 6Google Scholar, who proposes to insert [ex. gr.’

page 216 note 2 These include Professors Miihll, P. von der (Kritisches Hypomnema zur llias [1952], ix, 9Google Scholar) and Page, D. L. (The Homeric Odyssey [1955]. P. 35. n. 32Google Scholar), and Sealey, Mr. Raphael (R.É.G. lxx [1957], 342, n. 83).Google Scholar

page 217 note 1 For the fragments I follow Jacoby (No. 485 F 1–11); of the lestimonium (T 1) le prints only what is immediately relevant—the full text can be found at No. 330 T 4. My debt to Jacoby's work needs no emphasizing; it will be obvious that without it I could not even have begun to write this paper.

page 217 note 2 Hereas/Heragoras (No. 486) on the other hand is twice called (F 1, 4—both from Plutarch).

page 217 note 3 If I had to suggest a source for this fragment, I should be inclined to ascribe it to Hereas (486); three of his four known fragments (F 1, 3, 4) come from Plutarch, and he seems to have had an anti-Athenian bias of which there is no direct evidence in the fragments of Dieuchidas.

page 218 note 1 Should not Eumelus (77, 451) rank as another? Even Pausanias found it a bit hard to swallow the idea that an eighth century poet could have composed a prose (2. I. l).

page 218 note 2 He just scrapes into F. gr. Hist, as No. 407 on the strength of Philostratus' reference to his Pythian and Olympic (Vit. Soph. i. 9. 2).

page 218 note 3 This list consists of Euagon of Samos (identified by Jacoby with Eugaion—535), Deïochus of Proconnesus (out of whom Jacoby makes D. of Cyzicus [471] and Bion of Proconnesus [332]), Eudemus of Paros, Democles of Phygele (VI-a work ascribed to him was known to Demetrius of Scepsis in the second century B.C. [Strab. 1. 3. 17]), Hecataeus of Miletus (1), Acusilaus of Argos (2), Charon of Lampsacus (262), and Amelesagoras of Chalcedon (out of whom Jacoby extracts an unnameable Chalcedonian and A. of Athens (?) [330]). If this list is intended to be chronological (as it rather seems to be), there is a very strong chance that everyone mentioned before Hecataeus of Miletus should be classified widi the Pseudepigrapha.

page 218 note 4 Jacoby accepts this as a reference to the Milesian (1), but there is at least as good a chance that the Abderite (264) is meant.

page 219 note 1 Wilamowitz also mentions Timaeus, but I cannot find him in Drachmann's text. Menaechmus wrote about Alexander the Great, and lived in the time of the Diadochi (Suid. s.v. —T i). I do not see why Jacoby is so confident that he is identical with the Menaechmus whom Aristotle is said to have defeated by his book on the Pythionikai (Hesychius, Ind. Arist. 123; cf. I. Düring, , Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition [1957], p. 86).Google Scholar

page 219 note 2 I say ‘alleged’ deliberately; Herodotus’ silence about the whole transaction, in spite of its double attraction for him in its combination of international arbitration and Athenian text-slinging, seems to me to cast grave doubt upon the historical truth of any version of the story in which any Athenian is made to quote lines from the Catalogue of Ships, whether those lines are said to have been forged ad hoc or taken from an already existing text.

page 220 note 1 The more I read Plutarch, the more my conviction hardens (a) that he possessed, or had ready access to, most (if not all) of die works which he mentions, and (b) that he had both the will and the ability to read the books to which he had access, and to compile his lives and essays direct from the texts of the authors whom he quotes, without the help of andiologies and other predigested sources of information.

page 220 note 2 S.I.G.3 I, Nos. 237–51; the tables in serted between pp. 340 and 341 summarize the information very conveniently.

page 220 note 3 He seems to have missed the fact mat Dieuchidas' fattier, Praxion, bore the name of another historian who is alleged to have written Megarica (484. 1).

page 220 note 4 This is what Keil really wrote; Schwartz's suggestion that his ‘Bedenken … sind schwerlich begründet’ (R.E., s.v. Dieuchidas) goes quite as far as is at all fair. Jacoby's ‘Der widerspruch von Keil … ist nichtig’ (Noten, p. 231) would be excessively severe, even if ‘widerspruch’ was an accurate description of what Keil wrote.

page 221 note 1 ‘Ancestor’ has to be included as a theoretical possibility; on the literary evidence the historian may have lived as early as die sixth century—and even on Wilamowitz's argument it is not very likely that he could have lived to hold office at Delphi in 329.

page 221 note 2 Does the refusal of our sources to call him a Megarian mean that they, or weir informants, saw through the deception?