THE BOOKS OF PHAEDRUS REQUESTED BY CICERO (ATT. 13.39).

Around 16 August of 45 B.C. Cicero wrote a brief letter to Atticus (Att. 13.39) in which he reminds Atticus to send the books of the Epicurean scholarch Phaedrus that he had requested. The Greek words in the text of his request have been corrupted through the centuries:

Libros mihi de quibus ad te antea scripsi velim mittas et maxime

[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].(1)

Based on this passage alone, some have assumed with an unwarranted degree of certainty that Phaedrus wrote a work on the gods. In fact, the manuscripts offer no more than the following enigma:

[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] et [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. No other evidence exists to tell us the title of anything that Phaedrus wrote. Still, all editors have accepted [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as a reasonable decipherment for the letters `[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]' that appear in most manuscripts. Editors have made little headway, though, with the second title. Tyrrell and Purser report several scholars' suggestions ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], and [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), but prefer to leave the text obelized. On the same text Shackleton-Bailey comments, `Nothing worth record has been made of what follows in the MSS'.(2)

The …