Com. Adesp. fr. 1008 K.-A.: un esempio di prologo innovativo?

Abstract

Com.Adesp. fr. 1008 K.-A. is a witness of a play from the New Comedy, preserved on the back of P.Strasb. inv. G 53, which was edited by Georg Kaibel in 1899. It partially contains 29 verses in iambic meter by an unknown poet. The text is part of a prologue pronounced by an anonymous character, who has been identified as a god by some scholars: he seems to explain the function of divine prologues in the plays and he gives some information about the antecedents of the plot. This paper proposes to lay some new bibliological and palaeographic groundwork for the dating of the papyrus and for the discussion about evidence provided by the fragment, which could establish the authorship.