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A Fable Recovered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Extract

Under the title ‘Bilingual Document’ H. A. Sanders published in 1947 a small text written on the verso of a piece of papyrus in a cursive hand, consisting of three lines of Latin followed by eleven of Greek, all incomplete. On the recto was a Latin legal text, probably a record of court proceedings, ascribed to the late first or early second century A.D. It was natural to assume, as Sanders does, that the text on the verso was also legal, the more so as a combination of Greek and Latin is not uncommon in records of judicial proceedings, especially in the late third or early fourth century A.D.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright ©C. H. Roberts 1957. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 Latin Papyri in the University of Michigan Collection (P. Mich, VII), no. 457 (reproduced on plate XV (b)).

2 ibid., no. 456. On this text see now D'Ors, A. in Emerita XIX (1951)Google Scholar.

3 This may have influenced Sanders in dating the hand of no. 457 to the late third century, a date nearly two centuries later than that he assigns to no. 456. I should prefer to place the latter in the first half of the second century and the former in the first half of the third.

4 Aesopi Fabulae rec. Chambry, A. (Paris, 1926) II, no. 350Google Scholar, with two variant versions.

5 Professor H. C. Youtie, to whom I sent the identification, kindly checked some readings for me on the original and himself suggested a number of improvements in, and supplements to, the text of which I have availed myself.

There is no means of controlling the length of lines, but it may well have been considerable (on long lines in Latin papyri see Turner, E. G. in Studi in onore di A. Calderini e R. Paribeni (Milan, 1957) 161Google Scholar).

6 On this see Perry, B. E., ‘The Origin of the Epimythium’ in Trans. Am. Phil. Ass. LXXI (1940), 391 ffGoogle Scholar.

7 P. Amherst II, 26.

8 PSI VII, 848. For a discussion of Greco-Latin papyrus MSS on this pattern see P. Ryl III, 478, introduction.

9 P. Oxy XI, 1404.

10 An exception is P. Ryl III, 493, a handsomely written MS of the first century A.D.; the version of Aesop it contained may not impossibly be that of Demetrius of Phalerum (see Perry, o.c. p. 398).