a pointed bracket indicates that the letters within it are not or cannot have been in the MS. The emendations and restorations for which I believe myself to be responsible are marked E in the notes. All restorations have been checked where possible by a palaeographical method explained and exemplified in various articles in the periodicals. Briefly, it consists of the tracing of letter-groups from photographs of the extant portions of the papyrus or vellum MS. Suggestions are rejected which, when traced out by this method, are shown, with all reasonable allowance made for variation in the size of the letters and the spaces between them, to exceed or fall short of the requirements of the gap; and where the gap is bounded on the left by an imaginary marginal line, all suggestions are made to correspond-again with all reasonable allowance made-in what I may call for convenience 'written length.' Scholars who have not tried this method will be surprised, when they do, at the way in which it reduces the possibilities. One instance must suffice. In the first lines of Alcaeus 27, the letters Δ οι παί]δων, Α. of πρώτα, ΤΟ before γάρ, and IC of aλλJais, come immediately under one another. Metre requires two supplementary syllables in lines 1 and 2, three in line 3, and one in line 4. All these supplements must correspond in written length not only with one another but with any suggestions made for the four subsequent lines, and when they are made the result must be not only a passage satisfactory in metre, grammar, dialect and sentiment, but something which Alcaeus might have written. I should add here that so far as I have found it practicable my work on the new Fragments is based on the actual MSS.; where I have used only photographs the results should be taken as still requiring corroboration. The latter cases are indicated in the footnotes. The arrangement of the Fragments follows, where this can be inferred, the arrangement of the editions current in the later antiquity; but it must not be understood as certainly reproducing it. Cross-references to the numerations of Bergk and Hiller-Crusius will be found on page 431. I have added a separate index of the ancient authors, including those to whom we are indebted for most of our knowledge of these poets and their works. Among the modern writers who have collected, emended, and interpreted the Fragments, next to Bergk1 and those on whom he drew—Ahrens, Bekker, Benseler, Bentley, Blomfield, Boissonade, Brunck, Cobet, Cramer, Gaisford, Hartung, Hecker, Hermann, Keil, Kock, Matthiae, Meineke, O. Müller, Nauck, Neue, Porson, Reiske, Schneidewin,3 Schweighäuser,4 Seidler, Ursinus, Volger, Voss, Welcker, Wolf-I owe most to E. P. Grenfell, A. S. Hunt, Kaibel and U. von WilamowitzMoellendorff. My obligations to these, as to other recent and living scholars, are indicated in the notes. I must here record my thanks to the Director of the British Museum for permission to reproduce the Sotades vase, and to the Council of the Egypt Exploration Fund for allowing me to print the Oxyrhynchus Fragments; to D. Bassi, J. Harrower, W. Schubart, and the Directors of the Bibliothèque Nationale and of Graz University, for supplying me with photographs of papyri and other MSS. in their care. And I gratefully acknowledge the help and 4 Schw. 1 B 2 Blf. 3 Schn. encouragement I have received from Mrs. Adam, H. I. Bell, S. G. Campbell, A. B. Cook, R. D. Hicks, H. Rackham and A. J. B. Wace. An account of the MS. tradition when the authors concerned run into the sixties is a formidable affair, and would be beyond the scope of this book. For the most important, the scholar will find much of what he requires in O. Hoffmann's Griechische Dialekte and in the introduction to A. C. Pearson's Fragments of Sophocles. The earlier history of the text has been ably worked out by Wilamowitz in the works mentioned in the Bibliography. But it should be borne in mind that statements on the Aeolic metres and dialect published before 1914 may need modification. I cannot hope that the many references in this book are quite exhaustive, modern, and correct. But I have done my best to make them so. A few not quite obvious errors, of which the worst is Alexandrides for Anaxandrides on pp. 100 and 101, will be found corrected in the Indexes. In the translation of Sappho fr. 35 the proverb should be in square brackets. The omitted fragments of merely palaeographical value will be found in the Papyrus Collections-Oxyrhynchus, Berliner Klassikertexte, Halle, Società Italiana. It will perhaps be useful to the reader to know that Volume II, which is already in the press, includes Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, and Simonides, and that Volume III., which is in preparation, will include Corinna, Bacchylides, Timotheus, the Scolia, the Folk-Songs, the Anacreontea, and the Adespota, with an account of Greek Lyric Poetry. CAMBRIDGE, December 22, 1921. J. M. E. |