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Volume 102 No. 2
April 1998
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Nuggets: Mining the Texts Again
Andrew Stewart
Some underappreciated ancient texts offer a rich mine of information for historians of Greek art and culture. A neglected anecdote in Diogenes Laertius's Life of Stilpo documents the Athenians' continued veneration of the Athena Parthenos in the Early Hellenistic period. Two hitherto-unnoticed citations of a critical sentence from Polykleitos's Canon, in Diogenes Laertius's Life of Socrates and Life of Zeno, resolve a major translation crux, help to confirm that his work was under discussion in late fifth-century Athens, and demonstrate that absolute mathematical precision was indeed his stated goal. Some enigmatic lines of Sophocles' Ajax become intelligible when compared with Riace statue A, the Doryphoros, and the youths of the Parthenon frieze. A remark in Tatian's Oration to the Greeks compels the rejection of a third-century date for the poetess Corinna. Finally, some fragments of Eupolisis The Cities anticipate the procession of liberated cities in Ptolemy Philadelphos's pompe in Alexandria, and support an interpretation of the scene proposed on a previous occasion.
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