A proposito del Kitharistes di Menandro: nota a P. Oxy. LXXXII 5293, r. 14

Men. Kith. fr. 1, inserted by both Plutarch in his Περὶ εὐθυμίας (Plut. mor. 466a-b), and Stobaeus in his σύγκρισις πενίας καὶ πλούτου (Stob. ecl. IV 33,13), was undoubtedly the most famous passage from this comedy in the ancient times and is therefore the most fortunate one. The discovery of P. Oxy. LXXXII 5293, carrying 19 lines of the same fragment, and so offering the only case in Kitharistes’ tradition where direct and indirect sources overlap, has aroused, of course, great interest. The not expertly calligraphic handwriting, probably a schoolboy’s, as well as the presence of some copying errors and notes, and the choice to copy a trimeter passage without regard for verse-division, immediately arose some suspicions towards the papyrus’ text, usually considered a lesser and manipulated version of the fragment. Moving from the hypothesis of the papyrus’s text descending directly from Plutarch’s version either by corruption or by abridgment, some scholars have been led to propose the reading λύπη for the badly damaged l. 14, showing traces of some element unknown to Plutarch’s version and certainly exceeding the measure of the iambic trimeter. The ipothesis of an intruded gloss λύπη raises, however, several problems and is, therefore, rather unlikely. A different reading, based on a different error dynamic, may now be considered