Ancora sul Fortleben di Euripide a Bisanzio. Giovanni Tzetze lettore dell’Euripide tragico (oggi) frammentario? Seconda parte: i riferimenti di Tzetze ad Euripide con citazioni letterali

The present paper constitutes the third and last part of a general reassessment of John Tzetzes’ knowledge of Euripidean plays other than the “selected” and the “alphabetical” ones (that is, the fragmentary and lost items edited in Kannicht’s TrGF V); parts 1 and 2 appeared in this journal in the last two years. Together, the three parts argue that Tzetzes had no direct acquaintance with the full texts of the today lost Euripidean tragedies and satyr dramas, instead relying on a vast amount of earlier literary and, above all, erudite sources (partially lost as well). These results stand in contrast to the increasingly held belief that all or most of the corpus Euripideum was still available to Tzetzes and his peers in Comnenian Byzantium. As for this paper specifically, it deals with Tzetzes’ quotation of Euripides’ ipsissima verba taken from lost tragedies (there is no literal quotation from his satyr plays). Many of these quotations turn out to consist in moral sentences, paratragic passages or famous loci of some other kind already known to, and cited by, several other authors writing centuries before Tzetzes: some of them can be shown to have been his direct sources. Special attention is paid to four Euripidean quotations whose survival is due to Tzetzes alone. Even in these cases, Tzetzes’ dependence on lost works of the ancient philological tradition can be more economically and plausibly postulated than his alleged familiarity with Euripides’ oeuvre. Only the quotation from Plisthenes (Eur. fr. 627 K.) defies location in the transmission chain, a fact that adds yet another mystery to this obscure play – if it was by Euripides at all –, but this episode alone is not able to radically change the picture.