INTRODUCTION

One of the protagonists of the Phoenicides of Straton, a Middle Comedy poet of the second half of the fourth century, had a terrible experience one day with a cook whom he had hired (Straton, PCG 1). The cook did not speak like normal people, but expressed himself in Homeric language, with the result that when he asked his employer how many people he had invited to dinner, he did not use the everyday Greek words for ‘men’, such as ἄνθρωποι or ἄνδρες, but the rare epic-archaic (and occasionally also tragic) term μέροπες, whose etymology was as obscure for the ancients as it is for us; for the ‘guests’, he used the rare word δαιτυμόνες ‘those who receive/bring their portion’. His confused employer could only interpret these as proper names. So too, when he asked the cook about dinner, the cook reeled off another list of rare glosses or Homeric words (μῆλα for ‘sheep’, οὐλοχύται for ‘barley, etc.), together with a few (to us) new forms, perhaps borrowed from some post-Homeric epic. Thus, an ox became ῥηξίχθονα … εὐρυμέτωπον ‘wide-browed […] soil-breaker’ (vv. 20–1), in which the second epithet is Homeric, whereas the first, though analogous in structure to the second, appears here for the first time, perhaps as a virtuoso novelty of the erudite cook.