The Psenclo-Gregorim Drama Christus Patiens. 
363 
THE PSEUDO-GREGORIAN DRAMA x P itro< nd6 X *v IN ITS 
RELATION TO THE TEXT OF EURIPIDES. 
By P. L. VAN CLEEF, Ph. D. 
PART I.—THE BAOCHAE. 
The Christian Drama XpidroS Ilddx^v, which by its superscription is 
ascribed to Gregorius Nazianzenus, has been clearly shown by Doering 
and Brambs not to be in accord with the other writings of Gregorius and 
assignable not to him but to a much later writer. Doering 1 attributed 
it to Tzetzes but Brambs, 2 who has most recently and most thoroughly 
studied the problem, assigns it with seemingly greater right to Theo¬ 
doras Prodromus or an author of that period, i. e. of the 11th or 12th 
century. 
The drama is a cento constructed of lines taken from the Prometheus 
and Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Cassandra of Lycophron, the Holy 
Scriptures including Genesis, Exodus, the Psalms, the four Gospels, the 
letters of Paul and even the Apocryphal books; but mainly, as the writer 
acknowledges in his introduction (v. 3 sq.), from Euripides, of whom he 
has used seven plays known to us, Hecuba, Orestes, Medea, Hippolytus, 
Troades, Rhesus and Bacchae. From these plays it is evident that the 
MS. of Euripides, that the writer had in his possession, must have been the 
second of the two classes, into which Kirchhoff has divided our existing 
MSS. of Euripides, and that no more plays were used may be accounted for 
on the supposition that the MS. used by the writer contained only the seven 
above-mentioned plays, with which were perhaps bound the two men¬ 
tioned plays of Aeschylus and the Cassandra of Lycophron. That the 
writer had no other plays of Euripides before him seems certain from the 
fact that he has plundered these in a most thorough manner, not con- 
2 De tragoedia Christiana quae inscribitur XpidroS LLddx^v, Realschul- 
prog. Barmen, 1864, p. 8. 
2 De auctoritate tragoediae Christianae quae inscribi solet XpidroZ 
Hadxoav Gregorio Nazianzeno falso attributae. Diss. inaug. scripsit J. G. 
Brambs, Eichstadii, 1883, p. 64. Cf. also the Praefatio of Brambs’ edi¬ 
tion of the Christus Patiens, Teubner, 1885, p. 17 sqq. 
