Presenting Fragments as Quotations or Quotations as Fragments

In this paper, we shall present some reflections on issues that arise when scholars prepare new editions of fragmentarily preserved works from antiquity. Our focus will be on those fragments that are transmitted as quotations in other extant texts from antiquity. In such cases, the textual sequences considered as fragments have to be dealt with in a particular way, as they are the results of several selection processes that have not been taken into account adequately previously. A digital approach provides better means to represent this special form of fragments, so that the complexity of the transmission of these pieces of evidence can be understood more accurately