athetize
/ˈaθɪtʌɪz
/(also athetise)
verb [with object] rare
Reject (a passage in a text) as spurious: (as adjective athetized) groups of athetized lines...
- When Homer said something that would better have been left unsaid, one option for the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria was simply to athetize it - to declare it spurious on the ground that Homer could not have said such a thing.
- You may find it was a line athetized by Aristarchus, or a word variant suggested by Zenodotus, in which case you can suspect your perception of the Greek language is getting better.
- Aristaracus, like many later commentators, was uncertain about the purpose of this passage and therefore athetized it.
Derivatives
athetesis
- No other work of Euripides has come down to us with so many distortions and has undergone so many atheteses as Iphigenia at Aulis.
- Proponents of this solution point to Aristarchus' athetesis of line 92, a verse that is also missing in papyrus 12, a mid-third-century BCE text.
Origin
Late 19th century: from Greek athetos 'without position' + -ize, rendering the Greek verb athetein.