Προσπάλτιοι (fr. 259)

317

- frr. lb and lc contain additional small portions of the left-hand side of col.
I from further down in the text (= Eup. fr. 258.18-26 K.-A. and fr. 258.21-4
K.-A,. respectively);
- fr. Id contains portions of the right-hand side of col. I (= Eup. fr. 258.1-40),
including the top of the column, and of the left-hand side of col. II (= Eup.
fr. 258.41-83 K.-A.), again including the top of the column.
The vertical relationship between fr. la-c and fr. Id—i. e. the question of which
partial lines in fr. la-c line up with which partial lines in fr. Id—is fixed by the
cross-fibers. There is no evidence, on the other hand, for where fr. lb and fr. lc
belong horizontally in relation to fr. la—i. e. for where those fragments stand
in the partial lines they preserve—and Lobel concedes that fr. lc might actually
belong to the left of fr. lb rather than to its right, where editors (following the
editio princeps) routinely place it. Fortunately the point is of little consequence
for the discussion that follows.
Lobel argued that there was no physical evidence for the vertical rela-
tionship between POxy. 2813 fr. la-c and fr. Id—i.e. for the size of the gap
between the preserved left-hand and right-hand portions of col. I—but offered
a plausible conjecture in 4 that would bring fr. la very close to fr. Id and
that suggests a line-width of about 30 letters there. In fact, POxy. 2813 fr. la
and POxy. 2813 fr. Id seem to join at 2, 6 and 7, and in 6 in particular fr. la
appears to preserve a trace of the left-hand lower tail of the lambda a trace of
whose right-hand lower tail is preserved in fr. Id.155 Because the letters are not
aligned in a regular fashion, and because individual lines differ in length—the
copyist seems to make an effort to finish individual words if physically pos-
sible—it is nonetheless in most places impossible to know exactly how much
is missing from the text.
Despite the implication of the continuous numbering in Austin 1973 (taken
over in Kassel-Austin’s edition of the text, and referred to throughout here
for the reader’s convenience), we do not know how many lines of the play are
lost between the final preserved line of col. I (= Eup. fr. 258.40 K.-A.) and the
top of col. II (= Eup. fr. 258.41 K.-A.). Nor is there any physical evidence for
the relationship between the various other fragments of the papyrus—many
of which (most notably POxy. 2813 frr. 3-4, 10-11 and 13-15) preserve little
more than a few unhelpful letters—except that if POxy. 2813 fr. 1 represents the
beginning of the text, all the rest must come after it. Lemmata are generally
difficult to distinguish or to separate from the commentary that treats them,

155

In the glass frame in which it is preserved, fr. la thus stands about 1” too high, and
about 1.5” too far to the left.