PREFACE

JIB. Afr. 15 = 24

As I breathe from the fatigue of proofreading and indexing, and contemplate with a lighter heart what should be said in this preface, a most sorrowful message arrives: GEORG KAIBEL has been taken from us and from the world of letters by a bitter death. He was most closely bound to me, not only by our shared studies beginning with our blessed time living together in Bonn, but he was also, as it were, the guide and standard-bearer in this common work of friends; it was both my duty and my joy to follow his authority. Indeed, the singular knowledge of Greek art that he possessed shone in no other area of literature more brightly than in the Comedians, which provided a splendid start to this Corpus referring to the larger project of Greek poetical fragments two years ago. I remember him as a youth laying his first foundations in Aristophanes, and I am told that this was the final care and complaint of his dying hours. Between these boundaries of a laborious and fruitful life, he traversed the entirety of Greek literature and brought back a rich harvest from every side. Yet he was nowhere more content or more intent than in the remains of Attic comedy. For the Dorians, whom he edited, were, I believe, touched upon because of them. If it is true (as I now profess freely, when it no longer seems envious to praise a friend) that one could hardly compare any other contemporary edition with the perfection of that first volume, what do we believe he would have achieved if fate had allowed him to restore Attic comedy itself for us from its fragments? He lived and breathed it entirely. Either no mortal, or, if any, he was born and prepared to summon the shadows of Menander and his peers from the underworld and call them back into the light of life. He had insinuated himself into their innermost habits through tireless labor and, perhaps even more, through a certain kinship of spirit. For his whole nature was fashioned to that Attic flavor. Just as the elegance of his writing shone above others, just as his most sweet conversation held his friends captive—before the tortures of his worsening illness began to obscure his serenity of mind—so his entire art of explaining and composing Greek verse (which was a frequent relaxation for him while healthy, just as it was a final consolation while dying) was infused with a certain Praxitelean referring to the sculptor Praxiteles, known for grace and refinement grace.

It was therefore a pleasant and almost necessary task for me, as I put together this volume, to follow in the footsteps of such a great man, as far as it was possible. No sane person will suppose that one can achieve by imitation that splendid felicity of genius which he often employed in amending the Comedians. Yet, it is right for anyone who wishes that this work, inaugurated under the most auspicious signs, be continued and woven with no inferior thread, to follow the rigor of the method he applied to collecting, ordering, and examining the witnesses—a virtue he himself rightly proclaimed as the primary merit of his book.