THE PAPYRI OF XENOPHON'S HELLENICA
Occurrences of Xenophon's history in papyrus fragments presently number
six. Five are listed by Pack.1 He includes another as a doubtful attribution. The
fragments are presented here in a sequence which follows his numeration. Since
classical authors whose work is found only scantily in papyri will continue to be
represented to us primarily by medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, it is particularly interesting to see how their text compares with that current in antiquity,
as evidenced by the scanty testimony of papyri. For this reason I refrain from
giving full transcriptions of each papyrus fragment and note only variations between papyri and a consensus of the manuscripts.2 I add wherever possible
readings of the papyri which agree with one particular manuscript.
II1 (Pack21552)
The most important fragment of the Hellenica is in the Erzhetzog Rainer
collection of Vienna.3 It dates to the first decade of the third century A.D. and
its 17 columns contain text from 1.2.2 [HT]IEAA to 1.5.8 TIZEAQEP[N]OT1.
No column is complete, but each originally consisted of about 40 lines with an
average of 17 to 20 letters to a line. The history was written on the verso of a
second century A.D. tax list. The scroll ended at 1.5.8, as the subscription
AENO(2NTOL EAAHNIK&N A after the last column indicates. The papyrus
was not written with great care, proven by its 27 misspellings, 16 through
etacism. The misspellings are omitted from the following list of variant readings:
1.2.2 [TE2N A0HN]AI2N ONTA[~] 1- 6virac r<Jv 'AOrvatov ro1)c codd.
1.2.6 [ITNE]AErEN H1 *odl'vpeye codd.
1.2.7 EFEON A[HEHAETZE] H1 E"Eeaov o rrXevae codd.
*Asterisks mark readings of the manuscripts which have been retained by a majority of the
most recent editors: Hatzfeld (Bude 1936), Marchant (Oxford 1900), Hude (Teubner 1930).
2.
1. R.A. Pack, The Greek and Latin Literary Texts From Greco-Roman Egypt, Ann
Arbor, 1965. I should say at the start that this article is an expansion of the first chapter of
my dissertation, The Manuscript History of Xenophon's Hellenica, (Indiana Univ. 1967),
available through University Microfilms, Ann Arbor.
2. For a consensus of readings I use my own collations ofParisinus gr. 1738 (B) and
Vaticanus Palatinus gr. 140 (P), each manuscript representing one of the two families into
which the tradition is divided and each being the most representative of the archetype of
the codices in its family.
3. First published by C. Wessely, Mittheilungen aus der Sammlung der Papyrus
Erzherzog Rainer VI, Vienna, 1897, pp. 97-113.
