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TIPPLING BUT NOT TOPPLING: EUBULUS, PCG FR. 123
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2019
Extract
The epitome of Athenaeus does not retain all the details of how these comic fragments were embedded in the conversation which Athenaeus originally presented, though the extract's first sentence shows that one purpose was to exemplify the application of βρέχω to drinking. Editors of both Athenaeus and Eubulus have left the connection of the latter's fragment to its conversational context at that. I submit that what follows in the epitome, as well as what precedes, casts light both on that connection and on how we should restore the text.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 2019
Footnotes
My thanks to Richard Hunter and Alan Sommerstein for comments and criticisms.
References
1 Besides PCG vol. 5, see Kaibel, G., Athenaei Naucratitae Dipnosophistarum libri XV, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1887)Google Scholar; Desrousseaux, A.M. and Astruc, C., Athénée de Naucratis: Les Deipnosophistes: livres I–II (Paris, 1956)Google Scholar; Hunter, R.L., Eubulus: The Fragments (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Olson, S.D., Athenaeus: The Learned Banqueters, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 2006)Google Scholar. Kaibel suggested <οὐ μετρίως>. Postgate, J.P., ‘A few notes on Athenaeus’, CQ 2 (1908), 294–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar supplied <ἠφάνικ’, οὐ>, ‘I've made it vanish, not drunk it’. However, his model for this (Plaut. Mil. 833–4 di me perdant si bibi … obsorbui, ‘I'm damned if I drank … I glugged’) works better, because the punchline comes second. Desrousseaux and Astruc supplied <οὐχ ὅσον> and assigned all of lines 3–4 to ‘A.’; I do not see parallels for a peremptory question with οὗτος being merely rhetorical.
2 For a particularly stimulating discussion of the dynamics of competitive citation in Athenaeus, see Jacob, C., ‘La citation comme performance dans les Deipnosophistes d'Athénée’, in Darbo-Peschanski, C. (ed.), La citation dans l'antiquité (Grenoble, 2004), 147–74Google Scholar.
3 Dickey, E., Greek Forms of Address (Oxford, 1996), 154–5Google Scholar argues that the implication of exasperation or rudeness was overplayed in earlier scholarship, while accepting that it is present in many of Aristophanes’ uses. Jacobson, D.J., ‘Vocative οὗτος in Greek drama’, CPh 110 (2015), 193–214Google Scholar identifies an irritated tone in passages such as ours, but concentrates more on the attention-seeking function than on the tonal range of οὗτος addresses which are clause-initial.
4 Cf. οὗτος, καθεύδεις; at Ar. Nub. 732 for this order.
5 See Handley, E.W., The Dyskolos of Menander (London, 1965)Google Scholar on Dys. 889.
6 This repute is discussed soon after in Ath. Deipn. 1 (29d–f); see also ps.-Dem. Lacrit. 10, Men. PCG fr. 224.5, and x4 in the Hippocratic Aff. Inter.