Abstract

The rich apparatus of scholia and marginalia transmitted in Lucian’s manuscripts can prove of vital help for the constitutio textus of his writings. On the one hand, their ancient and stratified origin makes it possible that they preserve traces of an earlier stage of Lucian’s text, both directly, through explicit quotations of lost variants, and indirectly, through hints given in the explanations of lemmas. On the other hand, they may allow us to recognise as problematic passages that otherwise would go unnoticed, especially in the case of intruded glosses which convey a coherent and not suspect text. The Lexiphanes, with its deliberately absurd and confused vocabulary, represents a perfect case study for the peculiar situation where it is hard to state whether a text is corrupt or not. In the present article, three textual passages from this Lucianic dialogue (Lex. 1; 3; 6) will be analysed. In all three cases, hitherto unnoticed errors will be detected and new corrections will be proposed thanks to the direct or indirect help given by the scholia and marginalia found in manuscripts.