Euripides’ Thyestes, fr. 394

This article contains new considerations on the constitutio textus of Euripides’ fr. 394, consisting in one line from a lost play titled Thyestes. The fragment is witnessed by the so-called Florilegium Laurentianum, an anthology preserved in a 14th-century manuscript, and by the compilation of sententiae known as Melissa, attributed to the fi ctitious monk Antonius and probably compiled around the 11th century. The two sources complement one another, as the Laurentianum witnesses the quotation together with the names of author and play, both absent in the Melissa, but at the same time it lacks one particle at the beginning of the quotation, which is preserved in the Melissa. An analysis of the text and of its sources leads to the conclusion that improvements to the main extant editions of the fragment (Nauck 1856, 1889, Jouan-Van Looy 2000, Kannicht 2004 and Collard-Cropp 2008) are needed. The article goes on to suggest a reconstruction of the dynamics of the fragment’s tradition within the FlorilegiumLaurentianum in order to determine how and when the manuscript lost part of its text. By referring to the practice of rubrication in Medieval manuscripts, the state of the quotation’s text in the Laurentianum’s exemplar is reconstructed. The article ends with a suggestion of an improved edition of the fragment.