I drammi di Sositeo. Testimonianze e frammenti

The volume contains an edition of the tragic and satyr fragments of Sositeus of Alexandria of Troas (3rd century BC). Sositheus was an important author in his era and enjoyed considerable fortune in antiquity. He is remembered among the seven authors of the "Pleiad" of Alexandria in Egypt, the group of the most illustrious tragedians under Ptolemy II. The epigrammatist Dioscorides (AP 7, 707 = 23 Gow-Page) praises him as the third great author in satyr drama together with Pratina and Sophocles, attributing to him an archaizing reform of the genre. His main work, "Dafni (or Litierse)", in addition to presenting a highly original contamination between satyr drama, Euripidean romantic tragedy, comic motifs and bucolic poetry, constitutes a meeting point between post-classical theater and the future Greek novel. The fragments, which arrived by indirect tradition and were largely reported by an anonymous mythographer (Laur. Plut. 56.1, 14th century), are here accompanied by a critical apparatus, translation, contextualizations and extensive textual, thematic and lexical commentary, which updates the few studies available today: among the majors, the now dated dissertation in Latin by Franz Schramm (Münster 1929), the article by Felicia Napolitano published in «Rendiconti della Accademia di Archeologia, Lettere e Belle arti» in 1979 and the commentary by Paolo Cipolla hosted in "Minor poets of satyr drama" (Amsterdam 2003), excellent, but without the fr. 1 by Sositheus. The volume also contains three introductory chapters dedicated to a brief history of studies on Sositheus, to the analysis of the testimonies on the author and to the illustration of the sources reporting the poetic fragments.