I haven’t looked at all this, but two little points on the most recent:
τἄνω κάτω, | φασί, τὰ κάτω | δ’ ἄνω υ x doesn’t scan. φασι has to be written φασιν (two longs, then anapestic 4th foot). The lack of caesura (in both lines) is acceptable.
τουτ’ εστι, often written τουτεστι, is common in scholia, used like i.e. But here it’s surely part of the quotation. Which may well be garbled.
There is an exception in comedy. Apparently third foot dactyls divided on the second syllable (_ u | u) are not unknown in Menander or Aristophanes. But they are much more common in the first foot. See John Williams White’s charts here on pg. 147/8:
https://books.google.com/books?id=AKpJAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA147#v=onepage&q&f=false
They never occur in the fifth.
Are you defending φασι τα κατω? That’s, forgive me, ridiculous.
No. I’m only saying that my earlier metrical argument against it was incorrect and that I needed to revise it. Menander and Aristophanes used lines with (_ u | u) in the third foot every so often.
I think that your suggestion of φασιν with the anapaest on the next foot would be much more likely.
It’s misleading to say “Menander and Aristophanes used lines with (_ u | u) in the third foot every so often.” Hardly ever. And such a split resolution—for that’s really what we’re talking about—is out of the question in the line we’re looking at. It wd never occur at a point where there’s syntactical discontinuity or punctuation, whereas 4th-foot “anapests” are ten a penny, and that’s obviously what τα-κατω is (if the text is correctly transmitted).
I do think you’ll find the phenomena and the stats more meaningful if you think in terms of resolutions (only occasionally split) rather than of dactyls and tribrachs and so forth. The admissibility (even in tragedy) of “anapests” in the 2nd and 4th feet (esp. frequent in the 4th, as here), which do not admit anceps, is anomalous in that it’s not to be accounted for by resolution but rather as an analogical extension from the 1st and 3rd feet where it is a matter of resolved long anceps. But that’s a detail.