TY - JOUR
T1 - Athenaeus' "fragments" of non-fragmentary prose authors and their implications
AU - Olson, S. Douglas
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 by Johns Hopkins University Press.
PY - 2018/9/1
Y1 - 2018/9/1
N2 - This article expands on observations made by Dominique Lenfant regarding Athenaeus' citations of Herodotus, arguing that Xenophon and Plato, and thus presumably all prose authors, are cited in a similar fashion. This means that we can generally tell the difference between Athenaeus' quotations (which appear to be more or less reliable) and his paraphrases (which are not). I maintain that the situation is more problematic than Lenfant suggests, for again and again what seem to be minor edits of source-texts by Athenaeus himself or perhaps mere slips of an anonymous scribe's pen substantially affect the apparent meaning of the prose fragments preserved in the Deipnosophists. I also show that a number of passages in Herodotus, Xenophon and Plato that on Lenfant's criteria would have to be regarded as quotations, and thus as largely faithful renderings of the original, are badly damaged or have been subject to ideologically driven distortion of a sort that would be undetectable in the case of genuinely fragmentary texts.
AB - This article expands on observations made by Dominique Lenfant regarding Athenaeus' citations of Herodotus, arguing that Xenophon and Plato, and thus presumably all prose authors, are cited in a similar fashion. This means that we can generally tell the difference between Athenaeus' quotations (which appear to be more or less reliable) and his paraphrases (which are not). I maintain that the situation is more problematic than Lenfant suggests, for again and again what seem to be minor edits of source-texts by Athenaeus himself or perhaps mere slips of an anonymous scribe's pen substantially affect the apparent meaning of the prose fragments preserved in the Deipnosophists. I also show that a number of passages in Herodotus, Xenophon and Plato that on Lenfant's criteria would have to be regarded as quotations, and thus as largely faithful renderings of the original, are badly damaged or have been subject to ideologically driven distortion of a sort that would be undetectable in the case of genuinely fragmentary texts.
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U2 - 10.1353/ajp.2018.0024
DO - 10.1353/ajp.2018.0024
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85054194870
SN - 0002-9475
VL - 139
SP - 423
EP - 450
JO - American Journal of Philology
JF - American Journal of Philology
IS - 3
ER -