Φλυαρεῖ Εὐριπίδης: Tzetze commenta Euripide?

The Vaticanus Graecus 909 is one of the most important witnesses to Euripides' tragedies and their scholia; it is dated to the years between 1250 and 1280. In this manuscript, besides the two main scribes, we find a third hand (usually sigled V^2 or V^3) that, some time thereafter (probably at the beginning of XIV century), corrected the dramatic text, wrote a few glosses, some dull paraphrases and several scholia. These very scholia, mostly neglected by editors and often very hard to read, contain very curious and interesting material on various topics such as grammar, history, rhetoric, erudition, paroemiography, quotations from ancient authors (for example Aristoteles, Callimachus, Gregory of Nazianzus), mythography (with a pronounced Evemeristic attitude), etymologies and lexicography. By both contents and style, some of these may be related to Tzetzes' teaching (his name is mentioned several times, too, and he used to speak of himself in the third person) and doctrine; however, it is very difficult to state whether they are Tzetzes' work or a reemploy of his exegetical material by scholars of the early Paleologan age. So, the paper will focus on this aspect, examining an appropriate number of these marginal notes and trying to identify the sources used by this hand V^2 , what dates back to the so-called Paleologan Renaissance and what may be Tzetzes' work. In the end, the purpose is to try to shed some light on Tzetzes' exegesis of Euripides and, more broadly, on the Byzantine scholarship during the XII century.