4. Aristophanes of Boiotia SALVATORE TUFANO – Sapienza Università di Roma, Roma [email protected] 4.1. Aristophanes and His Works (TT 1-5) T 1 (= BNJ 379 T 1; FGrHist 379 T 1; cp. F 5 [Plut. De Hdt. mal. 31.864D]).683 Ἀριστοφάνους […] τοῦ Βοιωτοῦ “Aristophanes [...] of Boiotia”. T 2 (= BNJ 379 T 2b; EGM I T 1A; cp. F 6 [Plut. De Hdt. mal. 33.866F-867A]). ὡς Ἀριστοφάνης ἐκ τῶν κατ᾽ ἄρχοντας ὑποµνηµάτων ἱστόρησε “As Aristophanes retold, from the public records organized through the yearly archons” (tr. S. Tufano) T 3 (= BNJ 379 T 2a; FGrHist 379 T 2; cp. F 2 [Steph. Byz. α 330, s.v. ἀντικονδυλεῖς]). Ἀριστοφάνης ὁ τοὺς Θηβαίους ὥρους γεγραφώς “Aristophanes, author of Theban Annals”. 683 Since these witnesses actually belong to the fragments, I comment on the textual problems in the commentary on the single fragments. Salvatore Tufano. Boiotia from Within. Teiresias Supplements Online, Volume 2. 2019. © Salvatore Tufano 2019. License Agreement: CC-BY-NC (permission to use, distribute, and reproduce in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed and not used for commercial purposes). Tufano, Boiotia from Within – 4. Aristophanes T 4 (= EGM I F 1A; cp. F 1 [POxy. 2463, ll. 14-16]). Ἀριστοφάνης δ’[ἐν| τῆι α΄ {πρώτῃ} τῶν Βοι[ωτι-| κῶν πρώτῃ del. Fowler “Aristophanes, in the first book of his Boiotian Histories”. T 5 (= EGM I F 2; cp. F 3 [Suda ο 275, s.v. Ὁµολώϊος (= Phot. Lex. (g, z) ο 298 (III 82 Theodoridis)]). Ἀριστοφάνης ἐν β’ Θηβαϊκῶν ὁ Phot. ὡς Suda Ἀριστόδηµος Reines “Aristophanes, in the second book of his Theban Histories”. 4.1.1. Title The titles of Boiotian local historiography present problems that go beyond common doubts concerning the transmitted titles of any Classical historian: as with many other authors only transmitted in fragments, we lack certain information on many of the names of the genre.684 The parallel case of Hellanikos is paradigmatic, because the debate on the possibility that he could assign the title Ἀτθίς685 to his local history of Athens demonstrates the hardships of accepting that the same title Βοιωτικά (F 2) could be the original one.686 Aristophanes certainly wrote after Herodotus, since in the fragment (5) he comments on the arrival of Herodotus in Thebes. This tradition does not explicitly allow us, however, to 684 Cp. 1.3 for a summary of the (poor) knowledge we have on the biographies of the authors, discussed in the present book. 685 Cp. e.g. Nicolai 2010, on the possibility that Hellanikos’ works did not have specific titles, and Ottone 2010, according to whom the Athenian history of Hellanikos originally had the title Ἀττικὸς λόγος. 686 On the specific problem of the early development of Boiotian historiography, see supra 1.2.1. 190 Tufano, Boiotia from Within – 4. Aristophanes claim that Aristophanes was sensibly later than the author of the Histories. A prudent positioning between the end of the fifth century BCE and the beginning of the later century places Aristophanes in a moment when there was an early circulation of books and an incipient habit to assign a title to a literary work.687 Consequently, it is possible that Aristophanes was responsible for assigning a title to his output. The second problem to address is the variety of titles that are transmitted to describe the specific book where a tradition held by Aristophanes was retold. Two opposing stances have been taken, one which reduces the variety of the transmitted titles to two main works, namely the Θηβαῖοι Ὧροι (T 3), and a more generic work on Boiotia, titled Βοιωτικά / Θηβαϊκά (TT 4-5).688 The other assumes that the four known titles (T 2: Κατ᾽ἄρχοντας ὑποµνήµατα; T 3: Θηβαῖοι Ὧροι; T 4: Βοιωτικά; T 5: Θηβαϊκά) may be the result of pure invention or confusion in our sources: no possible conclusion on this detail, as a consequence, might be reached.689 In order to reconsider which option might be more probable, we will now shortly reflect on what has been generally transmitted in the tradition of the horoi and of the hypomnemata. In other words, it is useful to ponder whether the general picture which emerges from the titles transmitted under these titles may apply to the content of the fragments of Aristophanes. The identification of local historiography with horography was first suggested by Jacoby (1909): by assuming that local historiography could coincide with a narrative based on local annals (horoi), he implied that all local histories generally follow a constant annalistic framework. Such a theory, however, might be profoundly misleading, as scholars like von Fritz (1967 I: 97) have shown how the first local histories did not always depend on a political or evenemential plan: they could follow other internal criteria, relevant to their respective audiences, as is maintained in our present study. Further chronographical studies confirm the relevance of this distinction and the importance of the geographic area that was the object of the local history.690 Today, an immediate correlation between titles like Ὧροι and an annalistic partition is generally refused. 687 Schmalzriedt 1970. 688 Cp. Fowler 2000: 54. 689 Despite a preference for the first scenario (two works), Fowler (2000: xxxv) refers to a “confusion of titles.” 690 Cp. Tober 2017 on the role of the local audience and infra 7.1 on this debate. 191 Tufano, Boiotia from Within – 4. Aristophanes Local historiographical works, in fact, were often organized according to other criteria or the interests of the author.691 The chronological partition is not therefore a criterion upon which we can assess the relationship between local and universal history, in general. As Jacoby (1949: 68) said, the first one should be better understood as “that species of Greek historical writing, which we call Local Chronicle or better with a more comprehensive expression Local History” (my italics). On these grounds, the title itself, then, might not be enough to infer anything on the content of a work, and the existence of a title (Theban) “Horoi” could be the simple assumption of ancient scholarship. However, in the specific case of Aristophanes, the title Horoi finds more support in our witnesses. Our sources on his framework stress the fact that he followed the events kat’archontas (even when the title is surprisingly broader, as in the case of hypomnema). We then need to seriously consider that this memory of the title Horoi was more than an easy label for this specifically local historian. Whereas, in the beginning, Ὧροι mostly referred to works written in the Ionic world,692 Diodorus Siculus (1.26.5) was also aware that a further specification might be necessary: he feels the need to clarify that only “yearly chronicles” (αἱ κατ’ἔτος ἀναγραφαί) can be called ὡρογραφίαι.693 Despite, then, Plutarch’s generic definition of ὡρογράφοι as all the local historians of Naxos,694 the witnesses on Aristophanes, and the overall development of the title Horoi, concur to suggest that, in this specific case, Aristophanes may have followed an annalistic framework (cp. F 6, on the possibility of the mention of an eponymous archon). This annalistic framework was denied by Chaniotis (1988: 193 n.414), who thought that the hypomnemata (T 2; cp. Plut. Sol. 11.2) were the “Akten der Beamten”, i.e. official 691 Chronographical studies: Möller 2001. See e.g. Fowler 1996: 66 and n.28, for the mandatory caution to pay, before dismissing any possibility that these local histories were used by Herodotus. On the annalistic partition of the genre, see also supra 1.2.3. See Thomas 2014b: 160-2 for examples of the other criteria of local historiography. 692 Cp. Laquer (1926) on the origin of Greek local historiography from oral mythical traditions reported by the hexegetai, and from annalistic records from Ionia. Thomas 2014b: 164-5 concentrates on the political meaning of these works, where the foundation myths point out and stress their Greek origins. 693 Following this technical interpretation, only “horographies” suggest a stricly annalistic framework (Thomas 2014b: 150). On the Σαµίων Ὧροι of Duris, see Landucci 1997: 205-6; Pownall 2009 ad BNJ 76 F 22; Thomas 2014b: 155-6. On local historiography and the use of the title “Ὧροι”, see Thomas 2019: 36-8. 694 Plut. de Hdt. mal. 36.869A. Even in this case, nothing speaks against the possibility that these Naxian writers also adopted an annalistic model (Thomas 2014b: 155). 192 Tufano, Boiotia from Within – 4. Aristophanes documents, probably fictitious, in light of the partisanship of Aristophanes (ibd. 207). Nevertheless, the syntagm τὰ κατ᾽ ἄρχοντας ὑποµνηµάτα is a good periphrasis for Ὧροι, as Schachter (2012b ad BNJ 379 T 2b) observed, since it reduces the vagueness of ὑπόµνηµα and allows us to reject that they were simply notes or official documents. In fact, there is at least one meaningful parallel, the inscription of Sosthenes on Paros, whose first block (A 1 = BNJ 502 F 1) mentions the historical activity of Demeas. This figure mentioned other sources and events of the life of Archilochus, even if his work was generally open to myths and “non-political” subjects: the inscription says that Demeas “wrote archon by archon, and began from the first archon” (A1 ll. 8-9: κατ[᾽ἄρχοντα]/ ἕκαστον καὶ ἦρκται ἀπὸ ἄρχοντος πρῶτον).695 The ὑποµνήµατα can also mean, from the Hellenistic period, the “Archive von Höfen und öffentlichen Behörden”.696 The public sense and official aura coexist with the more general meaning of notes and private drafts (just like the Latin parallel commentarius). Plutarch’s passage on Aristophanes (T 2), as a consequence, may be more than a punctual autoschediasm of the title of the work, since it can also shed light on the potential use of sources of an archival nature, like the chronicles (Horoi).