Hyperides in the Archimedes Palimpsest: Palaeography and Textual Transmission

This paper focuses on the new Hyperides’ fragments derived from the Against Diondas and Against Timandros identified by N. Tchernetska in the “Archimedes Palimpsest”. Dating and provenance of the palimpsested leaves are discussed: the author suggests that the item from which the leaves ultimately derive can be dated around the eleventh century; the provenance cannot be surely established, even if Constantinople is a more suitable place than Near East or South Italy for a minuscule Hyperides to be copied. In the second part of the paper the author reviews other issues raised from the new find; in particular he discusses: (1) Hyperides’ circulation at Byzantium; (2) the arrangement of the speeches in the original item in comparison to the manuscript transmission of other Attic orators during the Byzantine age, circulated within ‘rhetorical anthologies’; (3) the relationship between Photius’ highly disputed account of Hyperides and the evidence provided from the “Archimedes palimpsest”, an issue which cannot be solved with a certain degree of confidence. Despite the new find, there is no clear proof that Hyperides was a well-circulated author in Byzantium; he survived to a somewhat limited extent; therefore, the original eleventh-century manuscript might have been ‘unproductive’ from a philological point of view, because it moved soon to a Palestinian monastery, where it was later re-used for the palimpsest.