Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

egypt 635
corrections, what were once judged the last and worst Greek poems –
birthday and wedding poems, panegyrics, encomiums and ‘salutations’
(cairetismo‹ ) – antiquity had produced; but these are now being reevaluated
with a new sense of their artistry that largely stems from a new
appreciation for the Weltanschauung they reveal. 112 They are the bookish
poems of a scholar whose library included codices and rolls of Homer,
Aristophanes, Menander (including a likely lawyer’s favourite, the arbitration
scene from the Epitrepontes) 113 and Eupolis, the poetry of Anacreon, a
life of the orator Isocrates and a Greek–Coptic glossary. 114
This archive, then, was the collection of an educated, bilingual, perhaps
even trilingual, lawyer; it is full of information on Dioscorus’ general
milieu, but also on more mundane matters like his village’s society and
economy. In this evidence we find that, in contrast to the great landlords
of Oxyrhynchus and their coloni, Aphrodito’s core was its small landholders.
115 ‘For the village consists of smallholders (leptokt torev)’, according
to a long petition to the duke of the Thebaid, 116 and wretched though
they at times claim to have been (when it suited their purposes), 117 they
seem on the whole to have been prosperous and well-organized: prosperous
enough to send delegations to Constantinople to plead their case
before the crown, and organized into a ‘collegium of village headmen (prwtokwm
tai), contributaries (suntelesta‹) and landowners (kt torev)’ to
represent the village in its formal business. 118 The village claimed, besides,
the special protection of the ‘divine house’ (divina domus) of the empress
Theodora and could gather as signatories in a report to her: eleven priests,
a reader, a deacon and a monk; twenty-two landholders and a village
headman; two notaries; the heads of the guilds of smiths, fullers, carpenters,
weavers, boatwrights, wine merchants – and more. 119
The village itself, 120 a former nome metropolis since demoted, dominated
a number of surrounding satellite villages. Located on a tell in the Nile
flood-plain, it was surrounded by land in quarters (pedia* dev) named for the
four main compass points. The land was sometimes classed as estates
(kt mata), farms (ge rgia) and pastures (bosk mata), in an apparently
descending order of value. Estates, sometimes amply described, included
such things as cisterns, wine vats, towers, vegetable gardens, vineyards and
112 Early (negative) appraisal: Maspero (1911). Current standard edition for most of the poems:
Heitsch (1963) 127–52; a new edition by J.-L. Fournet is in preparation. See further Viljamaa (1968). Reevaluation:
Baldwin (1984) ii.327–31; MacCoull, Dioscorus esp. ch. 3 (pp. 57–146); Kuehn (1995).
113 This point is made in Gagos and van Minnen (1994) 33–4.
114 List of works: Bell (1944) 27; Homer: P.Cair.Masp. ii 67172–4; life of Isocrates: P.Cair.Masp. ii
67175; Anacreon: P.Cair.Masp. i 67097 v F, with MacCoull, Dioscorus esp. 119–21; glossary: Bell and
Crum (1925). 115 For much of what follows: Keenan (1984a). 116 P.Lond. v1674.95–6.
117 E.g. P.Cair.Masp. i 67002.2. 118 P.Cair.Masp. i 67001.
119 Divina domus: Zingale (1984–5); signatories: P.Cair.Masp. iii 67283 with intro. and Jones, LRE
847–8. 120 Topographical and other data in Calderini (1966) 303–414.
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