Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 27 (1990) 45-47
Is &peEwitLV Really qLpOxreEw
(P. Oxy. XVII 2110.15)?
In a recent article, Theodore Brunner makes a cogent argument for
&pIt5rEUetv in P. Oxy. XVII 2110.15 (4th c. A.D.) being best translated as
"to seek or perform public service voluntarily."1 In this I believe he is
correct (but for some modification, see below). Nevertheless, Brunner's
translation suggests to me that &rp43tTectv, which appears only once in
all of Greek literature (Palladius Dial. de vita Joannis Chrysostomi 61.9),
may in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus in fact be a form of ýAJIOpE tLv.
That 6LPtLcEiE tu in this Egyptian papyrus is possibly a form of
)Ocx3TE~eite is suggested by four considerations. First, P. Oxy. XVII 2110
has several examples of itacism, whether a given instance be considered
a specific example of an early Egyptian koine tendency to
monophthongize the diphthong /ei/ into /e/ and then later to merge the
half-closed vowel /e/ with the high vowel /i/, or whether it simply
reflects the regular koine tendency for phonological raising to /i/ under
all phonetic conditions throughout the Roman period.2 I have noted the
following examples of itacism in column 1 alone of the Oxyrhynchus text:
64iXt (11. 15, 16, 17, 20, 22, but e64iXt in line 10); ExtpoT6v-ra ev (1. 5)
for exetpot6vnoeu; K OcvE (1. 12) for bKcEiOE; cf. EYEpov (1. 22)
corrected to E~epoc. Thus there is the distinct possibility and even, in
light of the other phonetic spellings in the text, likelihood, that the alpha
was spelled as iota in this fourth century text on the basis of phonology,
even though there is not another apparent example of this exact spelling
change in column 1. Another explanation may well be that the author
simply misspelled the word, with the tendency to misspell toward /i/.3
Itacism alone, however, is not sufficient to explain this change in spelling.
1T. F. Brunner, "'AptzeuieWu," ZPE 75 (1988) 295-96, quotation 295.
2V. Bubenfk, Hellenistic and Roman Greece as a Sociolinguistic Area (Amsterdam
1989) 214-18; F. T. Gignac, A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine
Periods, vol. 1: Phonology (Milan 1976) 189-90, cf. 235ff. S. T. Teodorsson (The
Phonology of Ptolemaic Koine [Goteborg 1977] 59) does not include this example in his
discussion, since it is too well known from 100 B.C. on.
3E. Mayser (Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptolemderzeit 1.1 [ed. H.
Schmoll; Berlin 1970] 38-39) cites a few examples of this phenomenon already from the
3d century B.C. He attributes several to mistakes by the author, an explanation which
must be recognized as a possibility in P. Oxy. XVII 2110.
0
