The fragments of Hellenistic oratory: introduction, text, and commentary
Keywords: hellenism
fragments
oratory

Contrary to the idea that most of the fragments of ancient authors have been already collected and edited, a scholar interested in Hellenistic history and literature may find it surprising that a collection of fragments of Hellenistic orators – or oratory – is not something we could at the moment find on the shelves of a library. For a discipline like ancient literature, which is fragmentary at its core, this seems a surprising gap: we can find collections of fragments for poets of all sorts, for dramatists, historians, geographers, orators (Attic, Roman), and for so many more literary genres that it would be natural to assume that, if we do not have a collection of fragments for a certain genre in a certain period, it must be because nothing at all of it has survived.
But fortunately, this is not the case with Hellenistic oratory: the present work constitutes a first attempt to fill this gap and aims at providing the first edition of the fragments of Hellenistic oratory (i.e. of named orators, but also of rhetorical exercises on papyrus), followed a commentary. It will hopefully constitute a first step in the direction of the creation of a comprehensive edition of fragments of Hellenistic orators and oratory, including commentaries on the testimonia (which are here not edited but used as sources for biographies), and on those fragments that for reasons of space (and according to the criteria stated below) could not be included in the present work. I have been able to establish a large corpus of testimonia and fragments, both in Greek and in Latin, for 84 orators. For 29 of them, there are fragments, either quoted or paraphrased, from an impressive variety of Greek and Latin sources. To these fragments, I have added 13 rhetorical papyri.
All identified named Hellenistic orators are ordered alphabetically. For those who only have testimonia and no fragments, I provide a succinct but comprehensive biography. For orators who have fragments, I provide a critical text. Depending on the length of each fragment, I choose either to comment line by line (for longer texts) or to give a general commentary on the possible nature of the oration it belonged to (for shorter ones). The same has been done for rhetorical papyri. The commentary on these texts also varies according to the nature of the papyrus: observations on the palaeography or the material aspects are discussed extensively only when relevant to establishing the nature of the text contained in the papyrus or to re-establishing its date; otherwise, just general information is given on these aspects. For longer papyri, I provide a general introduction to the content and the nature of the text, followed by a sentence-by-sentence commentary, while for shorter or badly damaged fragments I only discuss their content and general features. I have not attempted exhaustive commentaries on all the papyri, as if these were editiones principes, especially for texts where extenstive discussions already exist (e.g. P.Berol. 9781, on which I do not comment line by line but on block of lines, following Kremmydas), but I chose to discuss issues of reading and supplement, on the basis of my examination of originals or pictures, and offer material relevant to connections with fourth-century oratory.
Finally, the issues arising from the commentary on these texts have enabled me to underline some key topics that constitute different sections of a large introduction to this work, where my editorial criteria and my methodology are also explained.