"POxy" 2330 and Ctesias

W HEN A FRAGMENT OF PAPYRUS bearing 28 short lines of Ctesias' Persica came to light in Oxyrhynchus, this was a discovery of some interest.' Although the summaries and allusions of later authors provide a great deal of information about Ctesias' history, very few of his actual words survive. Hence the fragment has a significant contribution to make to what we know of the language and style of this work, as well as to our appreciation of its general nature.2 The text preserved by the papyrus is a remarkable one-first some mutilated lines of dialogue, then the first part of a love-letter, in which a rejected suitor writes of the agony which leads him to suicide. In Jacoby's edition it appears as follows

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