For whoever boasts that he is an expert concerning the godsSee Roger Goossens, "ΠΕΙΘΕΙΝ ΛΕΓΩΝ (Euripide, fr. 795 Nauck)," L'Antiquité Classique 7.2 (December, 1938) 215-216. I don't have access to Carl Werner Müller, ed., Euripides, Philoktet: Testimonien und Fragmente (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000),where this is F 14.
knows nothing more than to be persuasive when he speaks.
ὅστις γὰρ αὐχεῖ θεῶν ἐπίστασθαι πέρι,
οὐδέν τι μᾶλλον οἶδεν ἢ πείθειν λέγων.
5 ἢ πείθειν λέγων Musgrave: ἢ πείθει λέγων codd.: ἢ πείθειν λεών Hense: ἢ πείθειν ὄχλον F.G. Schmidt: ἢ ψεύδη λέγειν vel ἢ ψευδηγορεῖν Heimsoeth: ἢ ἀπατᾶν ὄχλον Wecklein: εἰ πείθει λέγων Munro
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Theologians
Euripides, fragment 795, lines 4-5 (my translation):