Traces of a Genre: Euripides and other Tragic Poets in Athenaeus of Naucratis

Tragedy is not cited often by the dinner guests in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, at least in comparison to 5^th- and 4^th-century Athenian comedy, which they quote or allude to thousands of times. This paper considers the character and content of Athenaeus’ testimonia and fragments of Euripides and the other tragic poets: What sort of material do we have from this source? And what would Euripides’ poetry in particular look like if we knew it only through the Deipnosophists? Building on this and more synthetically, the paper asks why Athenaeus (or Athenaeus’ sources) chose to cite the tragic poets; what it was about these texts that did and did not interest him (or them); and what the disparity with the handling of the comic poets suggests about the Hellenistic and Roman-era reception of such material. The first two main sections of the paper are devoted to the testimonia, the third and fourth sections to the fragments and Athenaeus’ handling of them.