I frammenti del grammatico Pio. Edizione, traduzione e commento

This dissertation provides a critical edition, with an Italian translation and a commentary, of the seventeen fragments attributed or attributable to the Greek grammarian Pius, who probably lived in the Imperial Age. These fragments show that Pius commented both the Homeric poems and Sophocles’ Ajax. In the Introduction, I critically review the hypotheses formulated by previous scholars about Pius’ chronological and cultural background: a thorough review of the surviving material reveals that Pius’ lifetime can be very likely set in the Imperial Age, between the end of the 1st and the 3rd cent. CE. As regard the geographical location, we unfortunately have no elements to identify the place(s) where Pius lived and worked. The research outlines Pius’ role as one of the hypomnematic sources gathered in the archetype of the scholia exegetica to the Iliad and the scholia vetera to Sophocles. Within the Introduction I also demonstrate that a previous interpretation, who traced back to Pius’ work all the discussions of Aristarchus’ atheteses preserved in the Homeric scholia, has to be dismissed. Finally, I propose a new hypothesis about the context in which Pius’ works could be read, on the grounds of some features of his interventions, which features suggest that Pius’ hypomnemata were used not only by other grammarians, in an erudite context, but also in the schoolroom, as a teaching aid. So, we could (re)think of Pius as a γραμματικός not only as a “scholar” (in philological terms), but also as a “teacher”, who delivered the second level of education. In the second part of the dissertation, I collect and study the surviving fragments, which I propose to classify as follows: one testimonium (T 1, which provides the title of a hypomnema of Pius related to the sixteenth book of the Odyssey); fourteen fragments which can be certainly ascribed to Pius (FF 1-14), eight related to the Iliad (FF 1-8), four to the Odyssey (FF 9-12) and two (FF 13-14) to Sophocles’ Ajax. I include in this group a new fragment (F 13) which was not considered in the previous collection of Pius’ material; one dubium (F 1*), which very likely belongs to Apion; two spuria, which I ascribe respectively to Apion (sch. ex. Od. 4, 356a1 = F 1**) and to the Roman grammarian Porphyrion (Serv. ad Aen. 5, 735 = F 2**).