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Άμφις (Amphis)

3. Tradition and Reception
From Amphis’ dramatic production there survive twenty-six play-titles (plus
two spurious: Callisto and Op ora) and forty-nine fragments (fourteen of which
are not assigned to any particular play). Amphis’ work enjoyed a conspicuous-
ly wide circulation in later antiquity; it is especially noteworthy that he was
known to and quoted by all major lexicographic authors. His major source
is Athenaeus, who preserves twenty-nine of Amphis’ fragments within his
Deipnosophistae. Amphis’ material is also preserved by Stobaeus, Pollux,
Diogenes Laertius, the Antiatticist, Hesychius, Photius, Suda, Eustathius,
Marcian of Heraclea, Hyginus, Aratus Latinus, as well as by ancient scholia (on
Plato’s Gorgias and Aratus’ Phaenomena). The popularity of Amphis among
lexicographers is to be interpreted as a sign of his overall unusual language;
indeed, what survives of his work substantiates this impression; see below
under “Language”.
The case of Athenaeus is particularly outstanding, since his Deipnosophistae
constitutes not only an invaluable source of Amphis’ material, but also a vast
pool of quotations from all literary genres; in most cases, Athenaeus is the
only source for the texts he preserves. There has been much scholarly debate
and controversy about Athenaeus’ own sources, method(s) of quotation, tech-
nique of writing, and mode of compiling such a huge amount of heterogeneous
material, as well as about his trustworthiness when he makes contextualising
statements. Given that the majority of Amphis’ fragments are preserved solely
by Athenaeus, there is need of a synopsis of some key data about this Second
Sophistic author. Athenaeus drew his origin from Naucratis, a city that, ever
since its foundation by Miletus in the seventh century BC, had developed
into a renowned place for Greek intellectuals, a major culture hot-spot, and
ultimately a centre of an early panhellenism. Within such an environment it is
only reasonable to assume that Athenaeus actually had first hand knowledge
and easy access to the originals of most of the works from which he quotes.
Similarly, during his stay at Rome, Athenaeus was able to make extensive
use not only of the well-equipped public libraries (looked after by the em-
perors; cf. Reynolds & Wilson 31991: 23-25) but also of private ones, e. g. the
library of Larensis, the host of the symposion described in Deipnosophistae
(praised in the prologue, 1.3a). At both Naucratis and Rome, Athenaeus must
have had access not only to texts from the classical period, but also to works
of Alexandrian scholarship, including Callimachus’ Pinakes. Yet, a caveat is
required: first hand knowledge can never be a guarantee of consultation for
the specific purpose of citation, especially since Athenaeus lived in a period
when anthologies and compilations of excerpts were extremely popular and