Menandro. Il Citarista. Edizione critica, traduzione e commento.

This thesis aims to offer a new critical edition as well as a new and updated commentary of Menander’s Kitharistes. The play is highly fragmentary: 117 verses are transmitted by two scraps of papyrus (P.Berol. 9767 and P.Oxy. LXVIII 4642), about 25 more are known from indirect sources. The main character, an athenian middle-aged lyre player, is named Phanias. Despite being rich and successful, he appears to be miserable, since he is worried about the life of the woman he’s in love with, whom he met in Ephesos; she was supposed to join him in Athens, yet she never arrived. The young Moschion, on the other side, is in love with Phanias’ daughter: the two of them also met in Ephesos, where he probably raped the lass during a festival, when he was drunk. She is now pregnant with Moschion’s son, thus the two youngsters need to marry as soon as possible. A few additional details of the plot emerge from the fragments, while others can only be speculated on. Both love stories certainly had a happy ending: after having reached Athens alive and well, Phanias’ woman probably helped the younger couple to conceal Phanias’ daughter’s pregnancy and finally to plan the wedding. The edition has been produced starting anew from the autoptic analysis of all the manuscript sources, which led to reconsider several of the latest editors’ choices. Beside the edition and commentary of the remaining fragments, the thesis includes a general introduction about the author and the play, a thorough papyrological and palaeographical analysis of all the manuscript sources, and a set of colour tables.