Per la Storia del Testo di Erodoto e di Quello di Tucidide Nell’antichità. Parte Seconda: Le Testimonianze di Dionigi di Alicarnasso e di Altri Autori Antichi

Abstract

Several of the very many literal quotations from Thucydides in the opuscula rhetorica of Dionysius of Halicarnassus are evidence for a text significantly different from, and better than, what is offered by the direct tradition, while none of the demonstrably interpolated passages of our Thucydides appears to have been known to Dionysius. A quotation from Herodotus I 57, 3 in Dionysius’ Antiquitates Romanae I 29, 3 gives the authentic reading in a passage that the direct tradition presents in an arbitrarily altered form. There is no evidence that any author of the first century BC knew passages of Herodotus or Thucydides which must result from deliberate interpolation. On the other hand some of the interpolated passages in our Herodotus and Thucydides are quoted or paraphrased or alluded to by Plutarch and subsequent authors. Apparently between the time of Dionysius and that of Plutarch (probably in the first quarter of the first century AD) somebody produced interpolated texts of Herodotus and Thucydides, which became the vulgate of these two authors.