Francesca Schironi Boeken

This book provides the first full edition and commentary of the Oxyrhynchus Glossary (POxy 1802 and 4812). This is a unique document both for the history of Greek lexicography and for the study of the cultural and linguistic exchange between the Greeks and the “others” in the Hellenistic near East. The fragment contains a fully alphabetized glossary with lemmas defined as “Persian,” “Babylonian,” and “Chaldaean”, as well as lemmas taken from Greek dialects or common Greek. The entries are rich in quotations from ancient authorities including Berossus, Apollodorus and Erasistratus. This glossary had never been analyzed in depth previously. Francesca Schironi provides a comprehensive introduction and commentary that places the Oxyrhynchus Glossary into the wider context of Greek lexicography and scholarship, discusses its interest for non-Greek languages and the problems related to linguistic exchanges in the Near Eastern areas, and shows the uniqueness and value of this document. The Oxyrhynchus glossary and this study will be of interest to classicists, papyrologists, comparative philologists, and scholars interested in the history of Greek lexicography and scholarship.

The volume contains all the fragments of Aristarchus of Samothrace preserved in the Byzantine Etymologica. These sources are here investigated for the first time in order to reconstruct Aristarchus’ work and exegesis. In addition to the collection of the fragments in the Etymologica (often derived from the original manuscripts, as most of these lexica are still unpublished) the author has gathered all the parallel passages in the scholiastic corpora, in Eustathius’ Homeric commentaries and in the rest of the grammatical and exegetical literature. Each fragment is explained with an in-depth commentary, in which the author deals with an often confused and intricate tradition and tries to clarify Aristarchus’ critical and exegetical principles. The volume represents an important step towards a complete edition of this relevant grammarian of the Hellenistic time.