An Iambic Quotation in Plato’s Timaeus

Abstract

At Timaeus 86d2 Plato quotes a line and a third of iambic trimeter probably from an unknown tragedy, possibly from a comedy. Its context is Timaeus’ argument that one suffering from diseases of the soul is often considered willingly bad, but wrongly so: οὐχ ὡς νοσῶν ἀλλ’ ὡς ἑκὼν κακὸς κακῶς | δοξάζεται, ‘he is wrongly considered not as sick but as willingly bad’. This quotation has not to my knowledge been noted in scholarship. The prosaic vocabulary of the quotation is reminiscent of Euripides, whereas its theme links it to Deianeira’s remarks on the disease of eros in Sophocles’ Trachiniae. As transmitted in Parisinus A and printed in modern editions, the quotation is metrically defective, lacking the word κακῶς. I argue that it was lost by haplography and ought to be restored, as was proposed in the commentary of a sixteenth-century translator, Cornarius (1561).