172

Eupolis

λίθους αγελαίους (“herd stones”) is a sufficiently odd and potentially
amusing expression that the phrase should probably be treated as an ades-
poton comic fragment, particularly since it can easily be integrated into an
iambic trimeter, e. g.
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fr. 405 K.-A. (375 K.)
Phot, a 810 = Synag. B a 806
άκούοντα άριστα· άντί τοΰ εύφημούμενος. Ηρόδοτος (6.86.α.2; 8.93.1) καί
Εϋπολις
άκούοντα άριστα Synag. : άκούων τά άριστα Phot. εύφημούμενος Phot. Synag.
: εύφημούμενον Fix
hearing best: in place of “being spoken well of”. Herodotus (6.86.a.2; 8.93.1) and
Eupolis
Citation context Drawn from the source shared by Photius and the Synagoge
B commonly designated Σ'", and presumably to be traced to some uniden-
tified Atticist work. Borries took the ultimate source to be Phrynichus (PS fr.
130*), but very similar material is preserved at Antiatt. p. 77.21 ακούει καλώς·
άντί τού εύφημεϊται. Ηρόδοτος τρίτω. εύφημούμενος must be the alternative,
non-Attic (“λοιπέ”) form of the expression and should properly agree with
άκούοντα, which would seem to support Photius’ άκούων τά άριστα. As
the definite article is nowhere used in the idiom (including in Herodotus),
however, άκούων τά is better understood as a corruption of άκούοντα than
as the original reading, and Fix accordingly proposed εύφημούμενον as a dif-
ferent way of dealing with the problem. But there is little point in requiring
consistency of this sort in a lexicographic source, particularly since the sense
is unaffected.
Text Herodotus has άκούειν άριστα (6.86.α.2) and ήκουσαν... άριστα (8.93.1),
so all that can be said of Eupolis is that he must have used some variation of
the Attic form of the expression, e. g. άκούοντα... άριστα or άριστ’ άκούοντα.
Interpretation άριστα is adverbial; for the idiom (first attested with the su-
perlative in the second half of the 5th century), cf. Ar. Nu. 529 άριστ’ ήκουσάτην
(cited by Kassel-Austin); S. Ph. 1313 ήκου’ άριστα. For the simpler εύ άκούειν,
e. g. Pi. P. 1.99; Antipho 87 B 49 (p. 359.7-8) D-K; X. An. 7.7.23; the contrasting
expression is άκούω κακώς, “be abused, spoken ill of” (e. g. Ar. Th. 1167 κακώς