Abstract

Dealing with fragmentary texts is an unavoidable task for anyone working on the Greco-Roman world with the awareness that only a tiny portion of the texts produced in antiquity has survived the perilous process of transmission. Since the Renaissance, generations of scholars have painstakingly collected and sifted quotations, paraphrases and allusions in later authors and grammatical sources, laying the foundation for our knowledge of large parts of that lost world. More recently a spectacular increase was made possible by the papyrological discoveries. Even so, after centuries of explorations in this field, the evidence provided by the indirect sources and, in particular, by the still partly unpublished troves of medieval lexicographical excerpts and compilations is far from having been exhaustively exploited.