Euripides bei den Grammatikern

This article aims to inquire into the presence of quotations from the plays of Euripides in Greek grammatical works dedicated to other authors or to general linguistic topics (accentuation, vowel length etc.). A communis opinio among editors of dramatic fragments holds that ancient Greek grammarians were not particularly fond of Euripides as a linguistic authority, and quoted from him less often than from his fellow tragedians. As a possible explanation for this lack of interest, one could adduce Euripides’ greater plainness of speech, which deprives grammarians of the first-hand material interesting for their purposes. This opinion happens to be largely based on Herodians’ treatise περὶ μονήρους λέξεως (On lexical singularity), which, as a matter of fact, does not quote Euripides at all (it quotes only two passages from Aeschylus and, above all, twelve from Sophocles – remarkably all from lost plays). However, a careful survey of other grammatical works and authors from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine period (including, among others, Philoxenos, Apollonios Sophistes, Apollonios Dyskolos, Georgios Choiroboskos) shows that Herodian’s reluctance in quoting from Euripides is peculiar to him and not shared with other grammarians in any significant way.Without denying that Sophocles has always been the ‘γραμματικώτατος’ among the Greek tragic poets, it has to be acknowledged that grammarians did in fact also find plenty of occurrences of noticeable grammatical issues in Euripides’ work and did not refrain from quoting them in support of their argumentation.