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ΑΛΗΘΙΝΟΣ (‘HIGH QUALITY’) IN AMPHIS, FR. 26 AND OTHER LATE CLASSICAL AND EARLY HELLENISTIC AUTHORS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2019

S. Douglas Olson
S. Douglas Olson*
Affiliation:
Bilkent University/University of Minnesota
*
[email protected]
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Extract

LSJ s.v. A defines ἀληθινός as meaning ‘truthful, trusty’ of persons and ‘true, genuine’ of objects, and offers Amphis, fr. 26 (preserved at Ath. Deipn. 2.57b and 7.277c, and identified in the latter passage as drawn from a play entitled Leukas) as an example of the second sense:

      ὅστις ἀγοράζων ὄψον <- x- ˘ ->
      ἐξὸν ἀπολαύειν ἰχθύων ἀληθινῶν
      ῥαφανῖδας ἐπιθυμεῖ πρίασθαι, μαίνεται
      Anyone who, when shopping for dainties …
      wants to purchase radishes, when he has a chance
      to enjoy alêthinoi fish, is crazy.
The context of the fragment is unknown. But the speaker is patently drawing a contrast not between ‘real fish’ and something that resembles fish (‘false fish’), as LSJ would have it, but between a type of fish that any sensible person would buy for dinner, should the opportunity arise, and radishes, which are edible but unexciting fare. So too at Macho 28–32, when King Ptolemy's guests were served a variegated rockfish (πετραίου … ποικίλου), three κωβιοί cut into steaks, and καράβων … ἀληθινῶν (29)—literally ‘real crayfish’—they were astonished and delighted. The reaction suggests that the banqueters were happy because the crayfish Ptolemy served matched the quality of the other seafood he set before them, not because the king had declined to deceive them (sc. by serving a different food disguised as crayfish).

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , December 2018 , pp. 712 - 714
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2019 

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References

1 Cf. (in a more summary fashion and without reference to Amphis) Montanari s.v. ‘veridico, sincero … || reale, effettivo, genuino … || letterale’. DGE s.v. notes the Amphis fragment and translates ‘pescado de verdad’, comparing Macho 29. Thanks are due Benjamin W. Millis and an anonymous reader for this journal for their careful comments on earlier drafts of this note.

2 Koumanoudes, S.A., Ἀθήναιον 6 (Athens, 1877), 131–2Google Scholar.

3 Wilhelm, A., ‘Psephisma für den Komödiendichter Amphis’, MDAI(A) 15 (1890), 219–22Google Scholar (= Kleine Schriften II.3, 331–4). See also Wilhelm, A., ‘Review of Kirchner, PA vol. I’, Berliner philologische Wochenschrift 22 (1902)Google Scholar, cols. 1097–8 (= Kleine Schriften II.2, 51).

4 The name is also attested twice on Tenos, another of the Cyclades, in the third century b.c.e. LGPN records no other instances of it anywhere. The data can be reconciled on the theory that Amphis was eventually granted Athenian citizenship; see Osborne, M.J., Naturalization in Athens, vol. 3 (Brussels, 1983), 113Google Scholar no. PT138. But it might just as well be the case that the Suda is in error, Hesychius or whoever the source for the entry may be having been misled by an abbreviated word or the like.

5 Athenaeus himself was from Egypt, and the fact that he preserves all surviving examples of this use of ἀληθινός may reflect his own sense that it was unremarkable. Amphis’ extended use of μαίνομαι to mean ‘act senselessly’, but with no implication of actual insanity, also goes unremarked upon by LSJ s.v., despite a lengthy note on the verb. Cf. Anaxandr. fr. 18.4, Antiph. fr. 230.1, Men. fr. 824, which combine to suggest that this too is a colloquialism, although in this case one well represented elsewhere in fourth-century Attic Greek; and note Amphis, fr. 22, where the idea is the same as in fr. 26 but with οὐκ ἔχει φρένας (‘he has no sense’) replacing μαίνεται.