Una congettura a Eur. Thy. fr. 396.1 Kn.

Abstract

Only nine fragments of the lost euripidean play titled Thyestes survived. What remains is not enough to delineate the plot and to identify the myth it treated. We are not able to determine whether this tragedy was about the first exile of Thyestes (due to his betrayal) or the second one (after Atreus’ wicked banquet). One of the most problematic fragments of Euripides’ Thyestes is fr. 396 Kn. From a part of textual tradition, it seems that Thyestes called his brother Atreus “old man”. Such an apostrophe could bear certain weight on the delineation of the plot. These verses are transmitted by Aristoteles’ Rhetorics along with an anonymous commentary to the same. In the main Aristoteles’ codex the first line is ἀλλʼ εἴπερ ἔστιν ἐν βροτοῖς †ψευδηγέρον† (Kassel proposed the dissimilation ψευδῆ, γέρον), but some manuscripts and the anonymous commentator read ψευδηγορεῖν, while others have the contra metrum ψευδολογεῖν. This lectio recentior and the collation of the other witnesses can be the starting points to elaborate an alternative conjecture.