In the course of describing the events of the 160s b.c.e., 2 Maccabees presents the texts of four letters: the Seleucid general Lysias to the Jews granting some concessions and referring their other demands to the king (11.16–21); two letters of Antiochus, to Lysias (11.22–6) and to the Jews (11.27–33), granting various concessions; and Roman envoys to the Jews (11.34–8) endorsing Lysias’ concessions. The third and fourth letters have at their ends (suspiciously) the same date, 15 Xanthikos of Seleucid year 148, c. March 164 b.c.e. The second has no date. The first, Lysias’ letter, is dated ἔτους ἑκατοστοῦ τεσσαρακοστοῦ ὀγδόου, διοσκορινθίου τετράδι καὶ εἰκάδι: year 148 on the 24th of a month; but the month name, standardly printed as Διὸς Κορινθίου,Footnote ¹ is impossible.

The author of 2 Maccabees as we have it assigned these texts to a single occasion and took the king to be Antiochus IV. The reality, most clearly laid out by Christian Habicht, is that the two royal letters are out of sequence, and they contain a significant difference. The second of the two grants a temporary amnesty, conditional upon the laying down of arms; the first (opening with mention of the death of ‘my father’) grants permanent amnesty. As has long been recognized, the second letter is from Antiochus IV during the military campaign of 165/4, the first is from Antiochus V and dates to its cessation in 163 or 162 (Antiochus IV died toward the end of 164). The letters of Lysias and the Romans precede the earlier of the royal letters, that of Antiochus IV.Footnote ² These differences of kings and occasions were lost on the author of 2 Maccabees, and on his readers.

The date 15 Xanthikos at the end of the letter of Antiochus IV (11.33) is highly dubious, as Habicht has shown:Footnote ³ for the deadline that the king gives for the laying down of arms, 30 Xanthikos, makes it most unlikely that he was writing from afar a mere two weeks before that deadline. As to 15 Xanthikos of the Romans’ letter (11.38), a doublet of that in the preceding letter, it is enough to say that the Romans did not use the Macedonian calendar.Footnote ⁴ But what of the date attached to Lysias’ letter (11.21)?

Codex Alexandrinus fol. 502: from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015057077862;view=1up;seq=441

The string διοσκορινθίου is already given by the two oldest Greek manuscripts, the Alexandrinus in the fifth century and the Venetus in the eighth.Footnote ⁵ It is not a month name, Macedonian or otherwise, and attempts at emendation began early. Variants of dioscor- are in the manuscripts of the Latin and of other translations. It should not need saying that the Seleucids used the Macedonian calendar.Footnote ⁶ Habicht judged the text of 11.21 hopeless.

It is visible that διοσκορινθίου is not a misspelled attempt to write one of the twelve Macedonian months: we should conclude that it is not a misspelling of a word but a replacement of a word, brought into the text from elsewhere—whether in the margin or interlinear—and supplanting the original month name, whatever that was. The error was not palaeographical but intellectual.

The troublesome string of letters points to a popular Greek phrase: Διὸς Κόρινθος, ‘Zeus's son Korinthos’.Footnote ⁷ Often expressed and explained, from Pindar to the fifteenth century, it is a critical comment, a complaint about repetitiousness or idle bombast. So, succinctly, the scholiast to Ar. Ran. 439: παροιμία ἐπὶ τῶν τὰ αὐτὰ συνεχῶς λεγόντων, ‘a saying for those who continually say the same things’.Footnote ⁸ The explanation offered by most ancient commentators was that Corinthian orators repeatedly evoked their city's founder, Zeus's son Korinthos.Footnote ⁹

For the ancients, the locus classicus for the saying was the finale of Pindar's Nemean 7 (104–5), ταὐτὰ τρὶς τετράκις τ’ ἀμπολεῖν … ‘Διὸς Κόρινθος’, ‘to repeat the same things three and four times … a “Zeus's son Korinthos”’. Thus the expression was already current in the first part of the fifth century b.c.e. Aristophanes applied it to a repeated action (Ran. 439) and to empty boasting (Eccl. 828, also Philostr. V S 611), Plato to a topic that has been exhausted (Euthyd. 292e), Plutarch to a tautological argument (Mor. 1072B), Libanius to a repetitious letter (Ep. 651.3).

But most pertinent here are some scholia to Thucydides. When at 3.116.3 Thucydides writes for the third time his jingle ‘the year ended in the war of which Thucydides wrote the history’, a commentator urged ‘one has to write here “Zeus's son Korinthos”’, χρεὼν Διὸς Κόρινθον ἐνταυθοῖ γράφειν. On ‘the year ended’, etc. at 6.7.4, he complained ‘in “Thucydides”, once again a Zeus's son Korinthos’, πάλιν Διὸς Κόρινθον ἐν Θουκυδίδῃ. And when he read the year's end sentence at 7.18.4, exasperated, he offered a trimeter: ‘“Thucydides”: everybody look at the Zeus's son Korinthos here’, Θουκυδίδης⋅ πᾶς τὸν Διὸς Κόρινθον ἐνταυθοῖ βλέπε.Footnote ¹⁰ So this phrase, as a criticism of repetitiousness, was something a reader might write in his copy of a text—in the case of Thucydides, earlier than the tenth/eleventh-century manuscript in which we find these complaints. In Roman times, as late as the sixth century (for example Thomas Schol. Anth. Gr. 16.315), and again in the Late Byzantine period, Thucydides was studied as a rhetorician, but far less so in the intervening eighth to thirteenth centuries:Footnote ¹¹ these comments on Thucydides’ repetitiousness have a good chance of being ancient.

I propose that this phrase stood in 2 Maccabees 11.21, beside or above the line where Lysias’ letter ends and the first Antiochus letter begins. The annotator, like the author, thought that Antiochus IV wrote both letters, each surveying much the same set of concessions, some of these cast in the same terms; and then the concessions are summarized in the last text, the Romans’ letter. He labelled all this a needless repetition, Διὸς Κόρινθος.Footnote ¹² A later copyist, not recognizing the slogan, took the string of letters to be not a critic's comment but a correction of a word in the line. He thought that that word was the month. Of necessity, he put the saying in the genitive, and apparently inserted an iota that makes it sound like a month name. Whichever was the Macedonian month, it would have been the only proper name in the line.

In the Venetus, the date attached to the last of the letters, the Romans’ letter, offers its own impossibility. To the date 15 Xanthikos has been appended a second name: ἔτους ἑκατοστοῦ καὶ τεσσαρακοστοῦ καὶ ὀγδόου, ξανθικοῦ πεντεκαιδεκάτῃ διοσκορίδου; no modern editor prints this last word, nor is it given in the Alexandrinus. I suggest that it derives from a second instance of the gloss Διὸς Κόρινθος, placed at the end of this, the fourth and last of the letters.

That is, at the start of the second letter and at the end of the fourth, a commentator bracketed these three with the comment ‘Repetition’, Διὸς Κόρινθος. Both notes were subsequently taken into the text itself, mistaken by a copyist for corrections. Our two early manuscripts thus both present διοσκορινθίου as the month of Lysias’ letter. At the end of the letters, in the Venetus the intrusive word has evolved into διοσκορίδου, probably under the influence of the familiar personal name Dioscorides; by contrast, at this place the scribe of the Alexandrinus, like modern editors, ignored or deleted the word as obviously superfluous, as he saw that there was already a month-name attached to the Romans’ letter.

If this suggestion is correct, these intrusions in the text had occurred by the fifth century, the time of the Alexandrinus. But it has long been known that the text of 2 Maccabees, itself already an epitome, was in its turn heavily redacted from an early date.Footnote ¹³