'ill

Fragments
fr. 268
(POxy. 2740 = CGFPR 98)
Fr. 268 as printed by Kassel-Austin consists of eleven papyrus fragments
of a commentary on Eupolis found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and dated by
Lobel, the original editor, to the 1st century CE. POxy. 2740 frr. 1-2 were
found together, and due to a fortuitous overlap between fr. 268.16-17 and fr.
281 and mentions of Phormio in the commentary on fr. 268c and again in fr.
268d, are generally—and probably rightly—taken to treat Taxiarchoi. The other
fragments of the papyrus (= fr. 268.56-176 K.-A.* * * * * * * * * * * * 198) are in the same hand, but
were found separately and may discuss a different play; Lobel accordingly
declined to publish them together with frr. 1-2, confining them instead to an
appendix. I nonetheless follow Austin 1973 and Kassel-Austin in discussing a
few small scraps of what may provisionally be regarded as the text of a play
by Eupolis (not necessarily Taxiarchoi) drawn from this material (fr. 268p-r).199
Austin 1973 (followed by Kassel-Austin in their edition) assigned the lines
in POxy. 2740 continuous numbers, following the order of the individual frag-
ments of the papyrus as printed by Lobel in the editio princeps. The physical
relationship among the various fragments of the papyrus, and between POxy.
2740 fr. 1 (= Eup. fr. 268.1-21 K.-A.) and POxy. 2740 fr. 2 (= Eup. fr. 268.22-55
K.-A.) in particular, is actually unknown, and either POxy. 2740 fr. 1 or POxy.
2740 fr. 2 might have come first in the commentary. As noted above, the

Phormio was brought back from the dead in Eupolis’ play, putting it in the mid-410s
BCE. Storey 2003. 260 develops Handley’s hypothesis further, suggesting that the
pot with the man on the fish may also be an illustration of Taxiarchoi that depicts
Dionysus’ triumphant return from an expedition to Sicily at the end of the action.
But Webster was merely speculating and in any case observed that if a single
play was in question, the other pots in the set suggest that it featured a chorus
of fish-men and the characters Tyro, Pelias and Neleus—none of which matches
what we know of Taxiarchoi. Perhaps more to the point, Crosby 1955. 76 identified
the material from the well-deposit in which the Agora pot was found as produced
over the course of several decades in the late 5th and early 4th centuries and then
all merely swept up and dumped together. The date of the ostrakon accordingly has
no bearing on that of the pot even if the latter does somehow recall Eupolis’ play.
198 Not “fr. 267.56-171” (Storey 2011. 214).
199 Storey 2011 and Rusten 2011—not unreasonably—ignore this material. Austin 1973
renumbered the POxy. 2740 appendix fragments, converting Lobel’s appendix frr.
1-9 into Austin’s POxy. 2740 *frr. 3-11.