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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
My purpose in this paper is, firstly, to investigate the relationship of the three passages printed below, and, secondly, to illustrate in passing the curious chain of historical accidents which have prevented the truth about that relationship from becoming common lore long ago.
1 Here and passim Boiotia means the Greek and Boeotia the Latin play.
2 Pace Ritschl, for whose opinion see p. 318.
3 Cf. Thyresson, I. L., ‘Quatre lettres de Claude Elien inspirées par le Dyscolus de Ménandre’, Eranos 62 (1964), 7–35;Google Scholar the discovery in 1959 of that play confirmed what had long been conjectured, that Aelian Ep. 14 and 15 are based on material from it, cf. Ribbeck, O., ASG X (1888), 12 ff.;Google ScholarLegrand, P. E., Daos (Paris, 1910), 22–3.Google Scholar For the relationship of the Epistolographers and Essayists to Comedy in general, see (with caution) Kock, Th., ‘Neue Bruchstücke attischer Komödie’, Hermes 21 (1886), 372–49;Google Scholar id. CAF iii (1888), 674–9;Google Scholar id. ‘Lucian und die Komödie’, RhMus 43 (1888), 35–44;Google ScholarLegrand, P. E., op. cit., passimGoogle Scholar and ‘Les dialogues des Courtisanes comparees avec la Comédie’, REG 20 (1907), 176–231, 21 (1908), 38–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 First noticed by Hertz, M., ‘Ramentorum Gellianorum (I-V) mantissa’, Academiae Fredericae Guilelmae Rhenanae primorum semisaecularium diem festum … celebranti gratulabatur Accidentia Vratislavensis Viadrina (Breslau, 1868), p. 18Google Scholar = Opuscula Gelliana (Berlin, 1886), pp. 62 f.Google Scholar; ‘Aulus Gellius und Ammianus Marcellinus’, Hermes 8 (1874), 286Google Scholar (= Opuscula, pp. 182 f.).Google Scholar
5 Cf. e.g. Pl. St. 467 ‘propino tibi salutem plenis faucibus’; Cur. 318 ‘gramarum habeo dentes plenos, lippiunt fauces fame’.
6 Among the real people whom Vitruvius mentions in the locus classicus on sundials Arcb. 9.8.1 (on which see now Soubiran's, J.commentary in his Bude edition of IX (Paris, 1969), pp. 240–71Google Scholar) as having been ‘inventors’ seven are of the third century or later; only Berosus, Patrocles, and Eudoxus belong to the fourth century. To these may plausibly be added Menaechmus of Syracuse, Philip of Opus, Meton and Euctemon, and Oenopides before we retreat to Anaximenes, Anaximander, Thales, ‘The Chaldaeans’, ‘Babylonians’, and ‘Egyptians’ as those who are or might more or less speciously be connected with sundials.
7 Plinianae exercitationes ad C. lulii Solini Polyhistora (Paris, 1629), pp. 632–58;Google Scholar see further Petavius, D., Variorum Dissertationum ad Vranologjion libri VIII (Paris, 1630), Diss. 7 and 8 (pp. 269–75; unfair to Salmasius).Google Scholar A convenient though sketchy account will be found in Sharon Gibbs, L., Greek and Roman Sundials (New Haven and London, 1976), pp. 6–8.Google Scholar
8 Herodotus' remarks are to be interpreted in the light of the comments of the scholiast on Aristophanes Av. 997 (414 B.C.) taken in conjunction with Aristophanes fr. 163 (Pollux 9.46), from Gerytades (408 B.C. or later), and a fragment of Daitaleis (Aristophanes' first play, 427 B.C.) unknown to Kock and Edmonds in Ach. Tat. Introd. ad Aratum 29 (Maass, E., Aratea (Berlin, 1892), p. 13;Google ScholarCommentariorum in Aratum reliquiae (Berlin, 1898), p. 62).Google Scholar
9 For a parasite's curse against a primus inventor, cf. Pl. Men. 451 ff.; for the expansion of the curse with -que adeo, Men. 597, Rud. 1167; for the personification of dies by a parasite and its maltreatment, Cur. 464 (St. 436, 453, As. 291). Adverbs in -atim are calqued freely by Plautus in violent contexts (Cur. 576 frustillatim, Men. 858 f. assulatim; articulatim Ep. 488. Plautus likes bizarre identifications (uenter = solarium), antithesis (unum/omnium), superlatives (optumum et uerissumum), gross exaggeration (three cases in the last three lines), puns (est/estur, cf. Per. 103 ‘nam Essurio uenio non aduenio Saturio’, assonance (oppletum oppidum). Plautus' parasites mix the vocabulary of the senses (see above, p. 310) and they like sub-Stoic paradoxes. The versification is Plautine: endstopping, cf. Men. 77 ff.; ‘uénter érat solárium’, cf. Aul. 655 ‘… álter érat teúm simul’, Poen. 374 ‘… dehinc érit ueráx tibi’; for ‘ub(i) is té …’ cf. Poen. 561 ‘úb(i) is detúlerit …’ The only handles that I can see for the suspicious to grasp are the use of ubi with the imperfect indicative monebat in the sense ‘whenever’ (cf. Lodge, , Lexicon Plautinum ii s.v. ubi B. 2. b), and the subjunctive essesGoogle Scholar (= ederes, not edebas) where in Old Latin an indicative would be expected.
10 Editions of Stobaeus (from whom two of the extant fragments come) were not specially rare (Trincavelli, Venice, 1536; Gesner (iii-iv only), Tiguri, 1543, 1559; Basle, 1549); and Grotius mentioned Menander's play in his Excerpta ex tragediis et comediis graecis turn quae exstant turn quae perierunt (Paris, 1626). p. 712.Google Scholar
11 In fact, the only extant sources (the Suda and Anon. De Comoedia 12) explicitly say that he is a poet of the Middle Comedy.
12 Salmasius' treatment of Hdt. 2. 109 (op. cit., pp. 635 ff., 640–1Google Scholar) does not bear examination, but he is right on the essential point that borarum obseruatio came in the late fourth century; there is some misleading manipulation in his dating of Antiphanes, for he makes it sound as though 386/3 B.C. is a. floruit, and not what his source quite clearly means, the beginning of Antiphanes' career. That Salmasius is quoting not the Suda but the pamphlet De Comoedia is clear from the peculiar expression ‘after the 98th Olympiad’, reproducing 
in the Greek. He will have read the work in the Aldine Aristophanes.
13 From which manuscript of Alciphron Lambecius took the letter is unclear; suffice to say that the letter is present in manuscripts which are known to have been in Paris, Rome, and Vienna in the seventeenth centuries, at all of which Lambecius studied. Schepers regrettably did not go into the anomalous textual history of this letter in his introduction to the Teubner Alciphron (2nd edn., 1895).
14 There is no ancient authority whatever for either of the birthdates still regularly repeated in handbooks for the birth of Plautus, 254 or 259/8 B.C.; the former is arrived at by counting back three score years and ten from 184 B.C., the date Cicero quotes (from Atticus) for his death (Brut. 60), the latter by counting back the same from 205/4 B.C., by a ludicrous combination of the supposed evidence of Mil. 629, where Periplecomenus says he is fifty-four years old, and Mil. 211 f., the famous supposed allusion to Naevius' imprisonment on which rests the dating of Mil. to 205/4 B.C. It would be interesting to identify the authors of these conjectures. The first is evidently older than Salmasius; Crinitus, , Depoetis (Florence, 1505), was not responsible.Google Scholar
15 Much too early on any view. Only Cistellaria is quite certainly to be dated before the end of the Second Punic War, and not by very long (cf. Cist. 202); there is no a priori reason to look further back than about 210 B.C. Plautus could quite easily have been born only a few years before Caecilius, c. 230 B.C.
16 Salmasius has ‘anno post urbem conditam quadringentesimo nonagcsimo nono idque anno ferme post bellum coeptum aduersum Poenos primum’, the date given in words; Boxhorn and Gronovius reproduce the same date in figures; nonagesimo is an error for octagesimo, for a.u.c. 499 is 254/3 B.C., and Pliny means 264/3 B.C.
17 See Bilfinger, G., Die antike Stunden-angaben (Stuttgart, 1888), pp. 56–8 for later evidence for horn-blowing to mark the principal hours.Google Scholar
18 See Gibbs, S.L., Greek and Roman Sundials (New Haven and London, 1974), p. 96 n. 25.Google Scholar
19 See Derow, P. S., ‘The Roman Calendar, 90–168 B.C.’, Phoenix 27 (1973), 345–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Ter. Ph. 514 ‘unam praeterea horam ne oppertus sies’ cannot be a literal translation; cf. Cato Agr. 156. 4 ‘deambulet horas IIII’, Quadrigarius Hist. fr. 51, Lucilius 472 M ‘puncto uno … horae inuasit’. Whatever Pollux is attesting for Menander at Onom. 1. 71 (is it 
) it is not the scientists' word 
which passes as Menander fr. 850 and has been cited by Bickermann, E. J. (Chronology of the Ancient World (London, 1968), p. 12) along with other evidence which if genuine attests not to the seasonal hour system in late-fourth-century Greece but to equinoctial-reckonings.Google Scholar
21 I should like to thank several scholars who have read earlier drafts of this paper for their criticisms and suggestions, and in particular Professor R. M. Ogilvie, who originally drew my attention to Sharon L. Gibbs's Greek and Roman Sundials.
