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CHRONIQUE - KRONIEK
Two Early Collectors of Euripidean Fragments : Dirk Canter and Joshua Barnes
I. Dirk Canter (Theodorus Canterus), 1545-1617
J. A. Grays drew attention in 1981 to the remarkable collection of Greek poetic fragments made in the late 16th century by Dirk Canter, and to its equally remarkable history : never published, little known or used even in its day, subsequently scattered and partly lost, passing through various ownerships, almost disappearing from scholarly record since the middle 18th Century1
The collection seems to have been devoted chiefly to the dramatists. Those parts of it which survive are now shared between the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (some of the comedians, including Aristophanes) and the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Euripides, the minor tragedians and the major part of the comedians)2. My own recent work on some of Euripides' fragmentary plays3, and a pointer from Stefan Radt towards both Grays and Canter, brought me to examine the Euripidean part in Oxford. I judged that Canter's achievement deserved a fuller evaluation man Grays had reason to give it, his purpose being in the main bibliographic and his subject mainly Aeschylus.
Dirk Canter (1545-1617) was the younger brother of Willem Canter (Gulielmus Canterus, 1542-1575), noteworthy still as the first modern editor of all three tragedians4. Grays infers, chiefly from a letter of Dirk dated 15 March 15715, which writes of Euripidean and other fragments, that the collection was begun in the
1 J.A. GRUYS, The Early Printed Editions of Aeschylus, 1518-1664, The Hague, 1981, p. 277-309 : Appendix III, «Dirk Canter's Fragmenta poetarum Graecorum», and p. 342-346 : Notes. Gruys' discovery was recorded by S.L. Radt in TrGF TV : Sophocles, Göttingen, 1977, p. 9 and more fully in /// : Aeschylus, 1985, p. 9 ; and by R. Kassel in Fragmenta Dramática, ed. H. Hofmann, A. Harder, Göttingen, 1991, p. 248 ; cf. ?. 30 below. The word «collector» in my title is gratefully borrowed from Kassel's title «Fragmente und ihre Sammler».
2 The Paris parts are described by Gruys on p. 302-305, the Oxford parts on p. 294- 304. The Oxford parts have the call-marks Ms. d'Orville 121 (Euripides), 122 (minor tragedians), and 123 (comedians).
3 C. COLLARD, MJ. Cropp, K.H. Lee, Euripides : Selected Fragmentary Plays : I, Warminster, 1995 ; Volume ? will follow by about 1998.
4 See esp. M. MUND-DoPCfflE, La survie d'Eschyle à la Renaissance, Louvain, 1984, p. 239-261 (earlier, «Guillaume Canter, Éditeur d'Eschyle», in Album (Festschrift ... C Verlinden), Gent, 1975, p. 232-245).
5 Letter to P. Daniel (1531-1604), French lawyer and humanist, transcribed by Gruys p. 279, cf. p. 297.
