La Commedia Antica negli etimologici bizantini: qualche lineamento

Abstract

This paper aims to give an overview of the fragments of Old Comedy (excluding those from Aristophanes) preserved by the four major Byzantine etymologica. It will be shown how these bulky lexica display very different approaches: three of them preserve a comparatively significant number of such fragments, while the other hands down just few remnants, which moreover seem to be characterized by no antiquarian/Atticist interest (if not the other way round). It will be argued that this substantial difference might not rest just on different sources or on the use of different versions of the same work; instead, it might depend on the different purposes and cultural environments that produced the individual etymologica, thus helping to shed light on the obscure dynamics of the textual transmission of comic texts in the Byzantine era.