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SOPHOCLES IN AFGHANISTAN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2019

S. Douglas Olson
S. Douglas Olson*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
*
sdolson@umn.edu
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Extract

In 1977, French excavations at Aï Khanoum in north-east Afghanistan—a foundation of Antiochus I Sotēr and subsequently one of the major cities of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom—of a building dating to shortly before the destruction of the place in 145 b.c.e. uncovered inter alia the remains of a papyrus and a parchment document. The papyrus text, dated by Cavallo on the basis of its letterforms to the mid third century b.c.e., preserved a fragment of a philosophical dialogue seemingly to be associated with the Peripatetic school. The second document consisted of two separate portions of a piece of parchment roughly assigned on the basis of its letterforms to the second half of the third or the first half of the second century b.c.e.; as also in the case of the papyrus, the letters survived not on the parchment itself but impressed upon the hardened dirt that surrounded it. Only column II of the original editors’ ‘Texte 2a’ (the more substantial of the two parchment fragments) contains a significant amount of text, which appears in neither TrGF nor PCG. I present it here without regard to standard editorial niceties, which are rendered impossible by the desperate state of the original document, now almost certainly lost, and the nature of the original publication.

Information

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 69 , Issue 2 , December 2019 , pp. 898 - 901
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2019

In 1977, French excavations at Aï Khanoum in north-east Afghanistan—a foundation of Antiochus I Sotēr and subsequently one of the major cities of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom—of a building dating to shortly before the destruction of the place in 145 b.c.e. uncovered inter alia the remains of a papyrus and a parchment document.Footnote 1 The papyrus text, dated by Cavallo on the basis of its letterforms to the mid third century b.c.e., preserved a fragment of a philosophical dialogue seemingly to be associated with the Peripatetic school. The second document consisted of two separate portions of a piece of parchment roughly assigned on the basis of its letterforms to the second half of the third or the first half of the second century b.c.e.; as also in the case of the papyrus, the letters survived not on the parchment itself but impressed upon the hardened dirt that surrounded it. Only column II of the original editors’ ‘Texte 2a’ (the more substantial of the two parchment fragments) contains a significant amount of text, which appears in neither TrGF nor PCG. I present it here without regard to standard editorial niceties, which are rendered impossible by the desperate state of the original document, now almost certainly lost, and the nature of the original publication:Footnote 2

The editio princeps proposes integrating the surviving words into iambic trimeters as follows:

Line 4 lacks a proper caesura, which ought probably not to be treated as a matter of great concern, given the flimsy nature of the text overall. Otherwise, the scheme works well enough to leave little doubt that these are in fact iambs. While relatively few words are preserved, there is resolution at only one point, in what is almost certainly a form of the divine name Διόνυϲοϲ in 18. This is thus more far likely tragedy than comedy; and if tragedy is in question, in the Hellenistic period the author is likely to be Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides, who were the objects of the overwhelming majority of scholarly and popular interest in this period. The vocabulary offers no reason to doubt this conclusion; note especially ἐϲ χεῖραϲ (not attested in comedy, although εἰϲ χεῖραϲ appears at Ar. Pax 317) in tragedy at Aesch. Septem 680; Soph. Trach. 442, El. 1120*, 1348*, Phil. 1346, OC 975; Eur. Hipp. 1194*, Andr. 429, Supp. 235*, El. 826*, IT 941, Ion 961. One form, however, calls out for attention.

As the editio princeps notes, 8 ἡμίν (scanned –⏑) as opposed to the more common ἡμῖν (scanned ––) is attested a number of times in Sophocles.Footnote 3 What the editio princeps and subsequent editors have failed to note expressly is that ἡμίν is never found, by contrast, in either Aeschylus (in 16 occurrences of the form) or Euripides (in over 150 occurrences).Footnote 4 The Aï Khanoum text is thus almost certainly a badly battered passage of one of Sophocles’ plays. Precisely what is going on in it is impossible to say, although if second-person singular γαμεῖϲ in 4 is right, this is a dialogue between at least two characters, one of whom is apparently said to be ‘marrying a goddess’,Footnote 5 and τεκμηρίῳ δὲ τῷ in 7, νομίζειν in 13, and perhaps ο̣υν τ̣αῦτα̣ in 14 and δοκ̣οῦντ in 19 suggest an argument about what someone can or ought to do. Zeus seems to be mentioned in 3, Dionysus in 18, and note also not only θεὰγ in 4 but also θεο in 2. The obvious candidate for the addressee in 4 is Peleus, although Sophocles’ play by that title seems to have featured him as an old man, to judge by fr. 487. But Peleus might easily have been a character in some other tragedy, or the discussion might be counterfactual, metaphorical or the like. What is perhaps most significant about the fragment, however, particularly in company with the philosophical text with which it was found, is that it shows that even on the furthest edges of the Greek world in the second half of the second century b.c.e. ‘classic’ Greek tragedies were still being read.Footnote 6

References

1 Rapin, C., Cavallo, P. Hadot, G., ‘Les textes grecs de la Trésorerie d'Aï Khanoum’, BCH 111 (1987), 225–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with discussion of the fragment treated here at 249–59. Rougemont, G., Inscriptions grecques d'Iran et d'Asie centrale (London, 2012), 241–2Google Scholar also presents the text (his #132), but is directly dependent on Rapin et al. and draws no further conclusions about author, genre or the like. The philosophical text is Rougemont's #131 ([this note], 236–40); see the careful discussion of Hoffmann, P., ‘La philosophie grecque sur les bords de l'Oxus : un réexamen du papyrus d'Aï Khanoum’, in Jouanna, J., Schiltz, V. and Zink, M. (edd.), La Grèce dans les profondeurs de l'Asie (Paris, 2016), 165–232Google Scholar, who offers inter alia a complete account of the archaeological context of both finds and speculates that the papyrus may have been brought to Aï Khanoum by Clearchus of Soli, who is known to have visited the place. See further Hoffmann's discussion in CRAI 2017, III, 1103–51. I am grateful to Prof. Hoffmann, Benjamin W. Millis and an anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this note.

2 I retain the numbering of the original publication, which includes a line containing only a few letter-traces at the very top. The bits of earth that preserved the writing on the papyrus and parchment texts were deposited in the Kabul Museum and are now considered lost; what survives are the photographs printed in the original publication (n. 1 above, figs. 15–23; originals in the archives of the Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan (DAFA) preserved in the École normale supérieure in Paris. The site of Aï Khanoum itself has been devastated by clandestine excavation, and there seems to be little hope of recovering anything else of scientific value from it.

3 E.g. Aj. 733, OT 39, 42, Ant. 253, El. 17, 272, 1318, OC 1201. Homer uses ἡμίν a number of times (e.g. Il. 17.415, Od. 8.569), probably as a metrically driven innovation; subsequently on the Homeric model at e.g. Semon. fr. 3.1 West, Thgn. 235, Theoc. 25.179, Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.897. The form is secure only once in comedy, at Phryn. Com. fr. 38 ἐβουλόμην ἂν ἧμιν ὥϲπερ καὶ προτοῦ, although it might also be printed at Eupolis, fr. 385.4, where editors routinely follow Elmsley in emending it away. See also [Hdn.] Grammatici Graeci 3.2 p. 517.19–22; S. Kaczko, ‘ἡμῖν, ἥμιν, ἧμιν da Omero a Sofocle : problemi linguistici e editoriali’, RFIC 130 (2002), 257–98. The failure of Euripides in particular to use ἡμίν seems to have been first noted in modern times by August Matthiae on Hec. 512 (his line 507) in volume 6 of his ten-volume edition of the tragedies (Leipzig, 1821).

4 The situation is similar with ὑμίν, which Aeschylus uses only once (at Supp. 259), Euripides never, but Sophocles constantly (e.g. Aj. 864, 1242, 1264, 1282, El. 804, 1328, OT 991, 1402, 1482).

5 Intriguingly, all that can be read in Col. I is γαμου in 18, which might—or might not—suggest that marriage is indeed somehow the main topic of conversation here.

6 Indeed, Aï Khanoum had a theatre with a capacity of around 6,000 people, leaving little doubt that, even if the parchment play of Sophocles was not performed there, other Greek dramas were. Cf. the elegant conclusion of Hoffmann (n. 1), 228 in regard to the philosophical text: ‘Mais l'essentiel demeure: le papyrus d'Aï Khanoum, témoignage de débats philosophiques récents dans les milieux platoniciens et aristotéliciens, est une illustration des intérêts intellectuels des élites grecques de Bactriane, et illustre de façon éclatante la vitalité de l'hellénisme, au IIIe siècle, au coeur de l'Asie centrale.’ That the Sophocles was written on parchment suggests that it is a local copy, as opposed to the papyrus, which must have been brought to Aï Khanoum from somewhere in the Mediterranean world.