The opening of Lucian's dialogue Piscator and its relationship to Aristophanes

What is it about?

By treating the first line of a dialogue of Lucian as verse, rather than prose, by means of a trivial emendation, the work can be set into a richer reception context.

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Why is it important?

Greek classics are transmitted by hand copies (manuscripts), and we almost never have access to the author's original copy. We aim to reconstruct that copy by carefully attending to our texts and thinking hard about whether an error might go undetected. Sometimes errors are very obvious because the text doesn't make sense. In this case, the suggestion is that a text might have had a more apparent connection with a different text if we correct a trivial mistake.