A Companion to Sophocles

By Kirk Ormand

A Companion to Sophocles presents the first comprehensive collection of essays in decades to address all aspects of the life, works, and critical reception of Sophocles.

• First collection of its kind to provide introductory essays to the fragments of his lost plays and to the remaining fragments of one satyr-play, the Ichneutae, in addition to each of his extant tragedies
• Features new essays on Sophoclean drama that go well beyond the current state of scholarship on Sophocles
• Presents readings that historicize Sophocles in relation to the social, cultural, and intellectual world of fifth century Athens
• Seeks to place later interpretations and adaptations of Sophocles in their historical context
• Includes essays dedicated to issues of gender and sexuality; significant moments in the history of interpreting Sophocles; and reception of Sophocles by both ancient and modern playwrights

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781444356892

Book preview

2

The Textual Transmission of Sophocles’ Dramas

P. J. Finglass

1 Introduction

Beginning a twenty-first century Companion to Sophocles with the transmission of his plays might seem a quaint concession to a bygone age of scholarship. What we have of Sophocles, we have: why should we concern ourselves with how we have it, rather than getting on with the pressing business of analysis and interpretation? Two reasons come to mind. First, the transmission of Sophocles’ dramas demands the attention of historians in its own right. Which plays were the ancients reading and performing, and when? Why were so many lost – or, alternatively, how come any survived at all? The shifting fortunes of critical scholarship, so brilliant in some centuries, so attenuated in others, will interest the student of intellectual history. And, from a practical point of view, the history of the transmission of classical literature is so vast a field that it may help to consider it from the vantage point of the works of a single major author. Second, understanding the transmission of Sophocles’ plays, so far from being a distraction, actually assists their literary interpretation. No one can begin serious study of these dramas without quickly realizing that our evidence for what Sophocles wrote is often tenuous or obscure. A sense of how Sophocles’ words were transmitted through the centuries, and of the processes of corruption to which they were exposed, is an important intellectual tool for dealing with this problem, and thus for ensuring, so far as possible, that interpretations are based on what Sophocles wrote, rather than on errors introduced during the transmission.

Historical and literary reasons thus unite to render this a significant topic for a wide range of scholars and students. Two recent studies, Kovacs (2005) and Sommerstein (2010), consider the same subject for Greek tragedy and Aristophanes, respectively. The brief discussion below is designed to be, as far as possible, complementary to these articles, which I commend to readers of my own piece.

2 Sophocles to Lycurgus

We have conflicting evidence concerning the exact number of plays written by Sophocles: 123 according to Aristophanes of Byzantium (257–180 BCE), as recorded in the ancient Life of Sophocles (late second century BCE?), but 113 according to the Suda (σ 815 = iv 402.5–6 Adler). Careful sifting of the preserved titles of plays suggests that 123 is the correct figure (Sommerstein forthcoming). Today, only seven of these survive in full, accompanied by about 10,000 words from the lost plays (roughly the length of another tragedy the size of Oedipus Tyrannus). We therefore possess just under 7 percent of his total oeuvre. This melancholy statistic prompts various lines of inquiry. When was the other 93 percent of Sophocles’ work lost? Why was it lost? How was the 7 percent preserved? How accurate were the copies which effected this preservation? How were errors introduced? How have scholars attempted to restore the words of Sophocles in the face of textual corruption? And when did that scholarly activity take place? In other words, what was preserved, when, and how well?

We begin with the original texts, written by Sophocles himself in preparation for the first performance of each play. Apart from his master copy, he will have provided texts for the actors and the members of the chorus; these probably contained only their respective lines (as in a papyrus of Euripides’ Alcestis, which dates from c. 100 BCE to 50 CE and was apparently intended for the actor playing Admetus: see Marshall 2004), perhaps preceded by suitable prompts. Hence, when Sophocles produced a play for the first time at the Dionysia or Lenaea, only one complete manuscript may have been in existence. The survival of the play’s text beyond that first performance depended on three factors:

1 Sophocles and his heirs (some of whom, such as his son Iophon and grandson Sophocles, were tragedians in their own right) will, we may assume, have wanted to retain copies of the scripts for their own purposes (see Revermann 2006: 84). The texts would have been an invaluable resource for writing future tragedies, as well as a source of family pride. Having more than one copy, and in different locations, would guard against loss by theft or fire.

2 In Attica there was probably a vibrant reperformance culture by the last quarter of the fifth century at the very latest (Revermann 2006: 68). An inscription from around the end of that century probably attests to Sophocles’ competing at a deme festival in Eleusis (DID B 3 Snell). Although this particular text might refer to Sophocles’ homonymous grandson, it would be excessively skeptical to deny that Sophocles’ plays were re-performed at other Attic festivals and maybe (like those of Aeschylus and Euripides) elsewhere in the Greek world. From 386 BCE, the re-performance of old tragedies became a formal fixture of the Dionysia itself. Such a practice demands the availability of written texts.

3 The fifth century also saw the growth of a reading public in Attica and beyond. Our earliest reference to the reading of a tragedy appears in lines 52–4 of Aristophanes’ Frogs (405 BCE), where the god Dionysus describes how he read Euripides’ Andromeda (412 BCE) to himself while on a warship. Not everyone could have afforded the cost of reading copies (written on rolls of dried papyrus stalks from Egypt) or the time to read them; but some would have been in circulation.

The earliest alterations to Sophocles’ original text may have been made by Sophocles himself; during rehearsals, or after a performance, he could have changed passages that he found unsatisfactory. But this brief period of authorial change (if it ever took place) soon yielded to the age of non-authorial change: of textual corruption, both deliberate and unconscious, by copiers of the plays. There are many processes by which this corruption takes place. Individual letter-shapes can be confused; so can groups of letters or words of similar shape. Letters representing similar sounds are interchanged, as the copyist voices the sound of a text internally while he transcribes it. The scribe’s eye can jump over words or lines and miss them out, or put them in the wrong order. He may also spot an error and correct it; sometimes he may be right, but more often he changes Sophocles’ word into his own, or compounds an originally small, mechanical error through some disastrous intervention. Deliberate change can proceed from less salubrious motives, such as a desire to improve on the work of the original author.

All the unconscious forms of corruption will have been in play from the moment when anyone (including Sophocles himself) made a copy of one of the dramas. Deliberate change of the text was presumably rarer; unfortunately, one type of such tampering seems to have been prevalent in the earliest stages of transmission. The emergence of the star actor in the fourth century led to the expansion of certain speeches through the insertion of spurious lines, designed to allow the performer more scope to display his talents. The greater popularity of Euripides in the fourth century made his plays particularly vulnerable to such attack; but Sophocles was not immune.

This activity did not go unchallenged. The Athenian statesman Lycurgus (active c. 338–325/4 BCE) commissioned an official copy of the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and actors were henceforth required to keep to this text (Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 15 and pseudo-Plutarch, Lives of the Ten Orators 841F = Soph., testimonium 156 Radt). This was, for him, part of a wider program, which involved the rebuilding of the Theater of Dionysus in stone and the erection therein of statues of the three tragedians. This Lycurgan text was the first attempt to deal with the problem of textual corruption. But it almost certainly did not involve a critical recension of the text. Lycurgus probably wanted to fix the text as it then was, preventing future corruption, but without attempting to correct mistakes already entrenched. Nor is there reason to suppose that he attempted to obtain a good text from which to make his official copy, which may well have contained many errors and spurious lines. His rebuilding of the theater in stone suggests that, for him, permanence trumped historical accuracy. As a result, modern scholars are confronted by that fatal gap between the time of Sophocles himself and the first official transcript (Dawe 2006: 19).

Sophocles became the subject of scholarly activity in this period, with monographs on him or his works by Heraclides Ponticus (testimonia 151–2 Radt), Philochorus (test. 149 Radt), and Duris of Samos (test. 150 Radt). But, again, it is most unlikely that any of these involved textual criticism. That awaited later scholars, to whom we now turn.

3 Alexandria to Late Antiquity

Ptolemy I of Egypt (ruler from 323 to 283 BCE, king from 305 BCE) established a museum (Mουει̑ον, temple of the Muses) at his new capital, Alexandria, which provided food, lodgings, and salaries for a permanent community of scholars. He also founded a library in the same city. Among the scholars was Alexander of Aetolia, who, at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (sole ruler 283–246 BCE), undertook a διόρθωσις (straightening, correction, recension) of tragic and satyric texts (test. 7 Magnelli = Soph., test. 158 Radt). That is, he attempted to identify and correct corruptions in the copy or copies available to him. He is the first person known to have done this. None of his criticism has survived. If that Ptolemy instigated the first recorded critical engagement with the text, the next king, Ptolemy III Euergetes (246–221 BCE), greatly improved the manuscript sources available to scholars – at least if an anecdote from four centuries later can be believed (test. 157 Radt = Galen, Commentary on the Epidemics of Hippocrates 2.4). He asked to borrow the Athenians’ tragic texts; our source does not specify that these were the Lycurgan recension (referring simply to τα` βιβλία – the books, or perhaps the famous books), but it is a plausible assumption that they were. The Athenians agreed, on condition that the king deposited 15 silver talents as security; but, once possessed of the documents, Ptolemy held on to them, happy to forfeit his bond, and sent back lavishly produced copies in their stead. If these were the Lycurgan texts, they were not necessarily an especially pure text of their time, but presumably they had at least remained untouched by further corruption for a full century (if the original papyrus survived that long without having to be re-copied). Now scholars could compare them against other sources in Alexandria to assist their textual criticism.

But which scholars? The vagaries of transmission compel us to jump ahead for a moment in what up to now has been a chronological account. Literary scholarship in this period was published in the form of separate volumes; but, in time, comments on individual passages were transferred to the margins of editions, usually in abbreviated form, and only sometimes preserving the author’s name. We possess some such marginalia in our papyri (that is, ancient copies dug up from the sands of Egypt from the end of the nineteenth century). These marginalia are the direct ancestors of the scholia (notes) written in the margins of our medieval manuscripts, where also some emendations and interpretations are attributed to named scholars of antiquity. The great majority, however, are unattributed, and many of these will go back to ancient scholars.

As a result, evidence for the work of individual scholars on Sophocles’ text is thin. Moderns regularly credit Aristophanes of Byzantium (257–180 BCE) with editing the whole of Greek tragedy, although there is no direct evidence for this. The medieval scholia preserve his name once (on Aj. 746 = fr. 359 Slater, not from a commentary on Sophocles), and he is the author of one of the hypotheses (prose summaries) of Antigone. Papyri (of Tr. 744 and fr. 730e.16–17 Radt, respectively) attribute comments to ΑΡ and AΡI, which could denote Aristophanes, Aristarchus of Samothrace (c. 216–144 BCE), or Aristonicus (an Alexandrian scholar of Augustan date); the last of these is probably the author of two variant readings attributed to AΡNI (frr. 314.72, 314.146). The same papyrus attributes over a dozen interventions to ΘΕ or ΘΕΩ (presumably Aristonicus’ near-contemporary, Theon of Alexandria); while NI (frr. 220a.84.2, 314.108, 314.156) could be Nicander of Colophon (second century BCE) or Nicanor of Alexandria (second century CE).

As for Aristarchus’ writings on Sophocles, the medieval scholia preserve his interpretation of a word in line 6 of Electra, while manuscripts of other authors record in passing explanations from three other plays: Chryses (fr. 728), Niobe (fr. 449), and Troilus (fr. 624). The later Alexandrian scholar Didymus (first century BCE) is mentioned nine times in the scholia. More of a compiler than an original scholar, Didymus probably preserves a good deal of earlier scholarship. Finally, two fragments of scholarly work on Sophocles by Pius survive; he is perhaps to be dated to the third or fourth century CE.

Whoever did compose an edition of Sophocles in Alexandria (and there may well have been more than one edition), the operation is unlikely to have involved a full recension of manuscripts. Careful attention to style and language will have been at the heart of the enterprise; other copies of the text will have been consulted from time to time, but not in a systematic manner (see West 2001: 33–45 on the text of Homer, for which the evidence is richer). The prestige of Alexandrian scholarship will no doubt have led to the edition(s) of Sophocles produced there being extensively copied and traded; we cannot say, however, whether all our surviving copies ultimately go back to Alexandria.

An epigram by Dioscorides (late third century BCE) cites Antigone and Electra as among Sophocles’ best works (AP 7.37 = 1597–1606 Gow–Page); both were to survive down to our own day. But there is no evidence that any of the dramas had been lost by this point. As we have seen, ancient scholars worked on a variety of plays not limited to the seven preserved today; and writers of Latin literature also allude to a range of dramas. But that was soon to change. The distribution of the papyri gives us a glimpse of what plays were read when, at least in Egypt, from where (thanks to the climate) almost all surviving papyri come. We have six papyri from up until about 100 CE, three as early as the third century BCE; of these, only one is from the seven plays that survive complete (hereafter referred to as the Seven). Papyri are most numerous in the second and third centuries CE, a period from which eighteen survive: the Seven are represented by nine of these. After 300 BCE there are fewer papyri: seven in all, the last of which comes from the sixth or seventh century, and all of which are from the Seven. The triadic plays (Ajax, Electra, and Oedipus Tyrannus), which in the Byzantine period are attested in many more manuscripts than the other four, have slightly more papyri, too, than the tetradic ones (10 to 7), and this difference is still more pronounced after 300 BCE (5 to 2); on the other hand, Trachiniae has more papyri overall than Electra (3 to 2).

In other words, there is nothing to suggest that, before 100 BCE, any group of plays was being read, performed, and copied (henceforth just read, to avoid repetition) more than any other. In the second and third centuries the dominance of the Seven is already emerging: half the papyri come from that small fraction of the 123 plays (50 percent from 5.7 percent). Other plays are being read at this period: nine different dramas are attested. Six are from the second century (out of ten papyri, or 60 percent), but only three from the third (out of eight, or 37.5 percent). This drop suggests a narrowing of focus onto the Seven even within the period when they are not the exclusive representatives of Sophocles’ work. (Five of the third-century papyri – three from the Seven – may be from the second century; if they all were, that would make the narrowing still more dramatic.) The complete absence of plays outside the Seven from the fourth century onwards is striking. Euripidean papyri from the same period do contain plays now lost (Oedipus, Melanippe Desmotis, Phaethon, Sciron), but Euripides was much more widely read throughout this time. It can hardly be a coincidence that seven papyri come from 5.7 percent of Sophocles’ plays (or in fact 4 percent, since only five of the Seven have papyri dating from after 300 CE). The other 116 plays stopped being read during this period, probably sooner rather than later; some were probably lost as early as the second or third centuries. This was the time when the papyrus roll was making way for the codex, or modern book format; many texts that were not much read will have failed to make the transition from one form of reading technology to the other, and as a consequence will have been lost, as the roll became obsolete. The sudden drop in the number of papyri from 300 CE suggests that even the Seven were being read less than before.

The secondary tradition, by contrast, is a less secure guide to contemporary reading habits. According to Pearson (1917i), p. xxxiii, direct quotation of tragedies other than [the Seven] died out at the end of the second century. Quotations from plays now lost are found later than that date, but they do not necessarily indicate that people were reading those plays then: lexicographers [and other authors who quote fragments] fed on lexica without the benefit of occasional refreshment from the texts of the authors cited (Dover 1993: 103). A collection and analysis of ancient quotations from Sophocles, as well as references and allusions to his plays, remains a scholarly desideratum.

Why the Seven became the dominant, and in time the sole, representatives of Sophocles’ work is unknown. A similar process took place with Aeschylus (seven plays), Euripides (ten, reflecting his greater popularity), and Aristophanes (eleven). Wilamowitz speculated that a single person made a selection for teaching purposes (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1907: 196–204). Two groups of plays, he suggested, were intended to be read together. Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra plays, and Euripides’ Orestes formed one such group; Aeschylus’ Septem contra Thebas, Sophocles’ Oedipus, and Euripides’ Phoenissae formed another. This implies that one person chose the plays for all three tragedians. We cannot confirm or reject this hypothesis; nor has a better one supplanted it. Wilamowitz’s conjecture (pp. 202–3) that the selection was made in the time of Plutarch and achieved general acceptance a century later has been borne out well by papyri (unavailable when he first put forward his idea in 1889); as we have seen, the Seven are prominent in the second century, dominant in the third, and sole survivors in the fourth. Papyri also suggest that the triad was more widely read than the other four plays of the Seven, perhaps because they were the first three of the selection. But the triad was nowhere near as dominant as in the next stage of the transmission.

4 The Medieval Transmission

The latest surviving ancient manuscript of Sophocles (containing part of Electra) dates from the seventh century. There is then a gap of three centuries before the earliest and most important medieval manuscript: Laurentianus 32.9 (L), a volume dating perhaps from the middle of the tenth century, which also contains the works of Aeschylus and Apollonius of Rhodes. Like all surviving medieval manuscripts of Sophocles, it is written in minuscule script rather than uncials (i.e. capitals). As well as the text, it contains our best selection of the ancient scholia, including many textual variants. A contemporary and closely related manuscript (Leiden BPG 60A, or Λ) was subsequently reused for another text (a palimpsest) and can be read only in part today. Akin to them, but incorporating material from a different branch of the tradition, is Laurentianus 31.10 (K), dated to the last part of the twelfth century. These three manuscripts, containing all seven plays, are the only medieval witnesses from before the sack of Constantinople in 1204. But from this period we also have the Suda, a tenth-century lexicon, and the Homeric commentaries of Eustathius, the twelfth-century archbishop of Thessalonica; both contain many Sophoclean quotations and occasionally preserve truth not found in the direct tradition. No doubt the sack and the dark period that followed saw the destruction of other manuscripts.

The restoration of the Byzantine Empire by Manuel VIII Palaeologus in 1261 resulted in the creation of many new copies of Sophocles’ text. There are several from the end of the thirteenth century and many more (some two hundred in all) from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Most of these will have been written in Constantinople or some other great urban center, but at least some (such as G, from 1282) were copied in Greek-speaking regions of southern Italy. The great majority contain at most three plays, and a significant minority only two (Ajax and Electra): this presumably reflects the contents of the contemporary school curriculum. Some of these manuscripts provide the earliest attestations of readings that most scholars today agree are correct; we cannot dispense with them in favor of copies from before the sack.

In addition to the scholia inherited from antiquity, manuscripts now attract a considerable amount of purely Byzantine annotation, including some by prominent scholars such as Manuel Moschopulus (born c. 1265) and Thomas Magister (active c. 1300–50), writing in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. By far the most important of these was Demetrius Triclinius (active c. 1320), an intellectual force as worthy of our admiration as, let us say, Casaubon or Elmsley (Dawe 1973–8: i. 80), who edited the seven plays and endowed them with scholia. His understanding of meter, and in particular of strophic responsion (the repetition, in a lyric passage, of the same combination of long and short syllables), allowed him to restore the original words of Sophocles in dozens of places. Modern scholarship on the text of this author begins with Triclinius.

The plays continued to be copied even as the Byzantine Empire fell into terminal decline. Its final years saw the transport of many manuscripts from Constantinople to Italy, before the city itself was sacked again in 1453. Fifteenth-century Italian humanists usually had little proficiency in Greek; Hellenic émigrés to Italy, however, such as Aristobulus Apostolides (1465–1535) and Zacharias Callierges (c. 1470–1520), did contribute to the restoration of the text via annotations in their manuscripts.

5 The Earliest Printed Editions

The plays of Sophocles were not among the earliest classical works committed to the printing press. His works first appeared in this medium in 1502, thanks to the famous Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius; perhaps inauspiciously, the book contains a misprint on the title page. The publication of the Aldine edition is a landmark in the textual history of Sophocles for two reasons. First, it ensured the continued survival of the plays that had been preserved up to that point. In 1501 there were perhaps a few dozen copies in existence of, say, Antigone, all on manuscripts up to half a millennium old: a precarious state. In 1502 the play could be found in hundreds of copies and would soon be available in thousands, as further print runs and fresh editions saw the light. Second, the Aldine made the text of Sophocles accessible to a greater number of scholars than before. Anyone with sufficient means and time could acquire a copy and subject it to scrutiny and emendation; no longer was it necessary to consult, or laboriously transcribe, a manuscript locked away in some private collection simply in order to read and study the plays.

Landmark though it is, the Aldine is not a particularly impressive piece of scholarship, in that it does not contain any significant attempt to correct the (by then) highly corrupt text presented by the manuscripts. (Modern scholars generally reject the one significant alteration that it does contain: the attribution of Ant. 572 to Antigone, not Ismene.) The same can be said of subsequent editions published during the first half of the sixteenth century, which were generally founded on the Aldine. Nor indeed was the Aldine based on a particularly good source. Yet the manuscript today acknowledged as the oldest and best (namely L) was known to scholars in this period; the scholia in its margins, which contain many important readings for the text of the plays, were published by Janus Lascaris in Rome in 1518. (L was already in use as a source for the printed text of Aeschylus.) It would be exactly three hundred years before a scholar discovered the significance of this precious book for the text of Sophocles. If this had happened earlier, progress in emending the text would have been considerably more rapid, as it would have had a much sounder base from which to proceed.

In the event not L, but T was to be the foundation of subsequent scholarship. That manuscript, heavily emended by the work of Triclinius and containing his scholia, was used by Turnebus for his edition of 1552. This formed the basis for the editions of Stephanus (1568) and Willem Canter (1579, the first printed edition to set out the lyrics in responding units), and indeed for all editions until near the end of the eighteenth century. As noted above, Triclinius makes many excellent emendations thanks to his appreciation of metrical responsion. Many more of his conjectures are implausible; yet his recension, conjectures and all, now became the default text, to be accepted unless it could be shown to be wrong.

Relatively little conjectural work was published in editions or monographs during this period; instead, scholars wrote down their ideas in the margins of their books. The three most important contributors whose work is known today were Auratus (1508–88), J. J. Scaliger (1540–1609), and Livineius (c. 1546–99). The failure of these and later scholars to publish so much of their best work can seem bizarre to modern academics, who are often under considerable pressure to commit their ideas to print whether or not they are ready to be immortalized. One must accept that different attitudes and customs prevailed.

This period also saw the beginnings of work on Sophocles’ fragments. Lost plays had been quoted by other ancient authors whose works had survived, and scholars now began to gather these quotations together. Dirk Canter (1545–1616), younger brother of Willem, assembled the first collection, together with those of the other Greek dramatists – a task requiring immense labor and dedication. His work was never published, but it was widely consulted by contemporaries such as Scaliger (who added fragments to it). Its Sophoclean part, now lost, may have been (as its Euripidean section, which survives, certainly was) accessible to Hugo Grotius, under whose name the first substantial fragment collections from tragedy appeared in 1623 and 1626. Casaubon had previously published the first list of titles of Sophoclean plays (1600: 303.7).

6 Bentley to Elmsley

After the death of Scaliger in 1609, nobody is known to have undertaken significant critical work on the text of Sophocles until Richard Bentley (1662–1742), whose many good conjectures in the margins of his editions were not published until 1816. More significant are the contributions of the Dutch scholars L. C. Valckenaer (1715–85) and J. Pierson, his pupil (1731–59); again, most of their work remained hidden in notebooks and marginalia, not to be unearthed until a quarter of a millennium after the latter’s death. Still more recently, the massive contribution by Jeremiah Markland (1693–1776) has come to light in the margins of one of his books.

Not all the best work of this period went unpublished. So far as editions are concerned, a few good conjectures are found in that of Thomas Johnson (1705, 1708, 1745, 1746), and many more in that of Samuel Musgrave (1732–80), which appeared in 1800. Two books of emendations by J. J. Reiske (1753) and Benjamin Heath (1762) were of great significance, presenting solutions to problems that virtually all later scholars have accepted as sound restorations of Sophocles’ words. Heath’s work also encompassed the fragments, presenting the first critical work on them for almost 150 years. But the single most important contribution was the edition published in handsome quarto volumes in Strasbourg in 1786 by R. F. P. Brunck (1729–1803). This work not only contained several good emendations; it put the text onto an altogether new footing thanks to the editor’s refusal to use the Triclinian recension as his base. Returning to the text of the Aldine, Brunck employed several manuscripts, including one known today as A, which most scholars have continued to regard as an exceptionally important source. (The Dutch scholar Tiberius Hemsterhuis (1685–1766) had previously noted the importance of A, and passed on his collation of part of the manuscript to Valckenaer, who was meditating an edition.) Brunck continued to print Triclinus’ emendations where he thought that they were right. But he no longer had to start from the position of assuming that Triclinius was right unless he could be definitely shown not to be, which in effect was the consequence of giving primacy to his version. Brunck’s edition was also the first to include the fragments as well as the seven plays; in editing them he was able to profit from unpublished work sent to him by Valckenaer.

Brunck’s text quickly became itself the basis for future work, such as the edition of six plays published by C. G. A. Erfurdt (1802–11). This work incorporated some of the earliest suggestions by Gottfried Hermann (1772–1848), whose unrivaled understanding of meter allowed him scope for many advances. The great English scholar Richard Porson (1759–1808) did not edit any play of Sophocles, but pupils and colleagues published his marginalia after his death. Peter Elmsley (1774–1825) produced an early edition of all of Sophocles (1805/6), but his key contribution was the rediscovery of the manuscript L in the Laurentian Library in Florence during the winter of 1818–19. The oldest and best manuscript was at last available to the scholarly world.

7 Dindorf to Jebb

The first edition to make use of L was Elmsley’s Oedipus Coloneus in 1823. After his untimely death two years later, L provided the foundation for T. Gaisford’s edition of 1826 and for W. Dindorf’s of 1830; the latter went through many editions and saw widespread use. No one since has disputed the centrality of L for any attempt to work out what Sophocles wrote. The key question quickly became what manuscripts, if any, scholars should use in addition to L, and what weight should be given them. C. G. Cobet (1813–89) argued that all other manuscripts were simply copied from L, and that any different readings that they contained were all the result of scribal error or conjecture (1847: 103). This preposterous theory should never have been taken seriously: there are too many places where obviously superior readings are preserved in manuscripts later than L, which could not result from copying errors and which could only be conjectures if we credit Byzantine scribes with emendatory acumen beyond that of a Bentley or Porson.

Yet taken seriously it was, and by influential editors such as Dindorf and Nauck, because it appealed to the spirit of the times in two distinct ways. First, scholars were making initial attempts to construct stemmata (manuscript filiation trees) as a means of eliminating individual manuscripts from consideration in the constitution of a text (see Timpanaro 2005). Putting L at the head of such a stemma had a specious simplicity, as well as the incidental benefit of absolving scholars of the need to consult any other manuscripts. Second, by downgrading all witnesses except one to the status of apographa (worthless copies), scholars implicitly asserted the value of conjectural criticism, which became widespread in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Although radical emenders such as F. H. M. Blaydes (1818–1908), J. A. Nauck (1822–92), and H. van Herwerden (1831–1910) did make many changes that have won general acceptance, their successes were greatly outweighed by their failures. Emending Sophocles was turning into a kind of game; the more conjectures one made, the more likely it was that some would win favor (or so it seemed), and so vast numbers of proposals were made, often unaccompanied by explanation or justification. This scattergun approach was in danger of bringing the subject into disrepute.

The editions of Lewis Campbell (1871–81) and R. C. (later Sir Richard) Jebb (1883–96) marked a reaction against this prevailing tendency. They do contain a few new conjectures, but their chief merit was to explain the transmitted text wherever possible rather than having over-hasty recourse to emendation. In doing so they made great advances in the understanding of Sophocles’ language. Both scholars were following in the footsteps of F. W. Schneidewin, whose edition (1849–55) was the first to accompany purely philological matters with interpretative inquiry. As often happens, the scholarly pendulum now swung too far in the opposite direction, and Campbell and Jebb frequently defended the text of the manuscripts when it is apparent that corruption had in fact taken place. Nevertheless, their timely contribution emphasized the truth that the establishment of Sophocles’ text requires vindication of correct manuscript readings against misguided assault, just as much as emendation of error.

Campbell’s collation of several new manuscripts for his edition also went against the spirit of contemporary criticism. He justified this course as follows (1874: 133): I do not promise that the fullest examination of the later MSS. will yield much result. But in the case of a writer like Sophocles, it is worth while to use to the utmost even the least hopeful means […] Collations of a few MSS. of the 13th and 14th centuries with some well-known edition might be published separately. His wish was not destined to be fulfilled for 99 years.

Dindorf’s edition of the fragments was widely used, but for scholarly purposes it was superseded by that of Nauck (1856¹, 1889²). This was also the time when scholars attempted to reconstruct the plots of lost tragedies and the contexts of the fragments: the pioneer in this area was F. G. Welcker (1784–1868).

8 The Twentieth Century

The discovery and publication of papyri from the end of the nineteenth century yielded many new fragments of the lost plays, some very substantial; for example, half of the satyr play Ichneutae was published in 1912. Pearson took account of many of these in his commentary on the fragments in 1917; more were available for Radt’s magisterial edition (1977¹, 1999²). The latter, although barely a decade old, is already out of date, thanks to a recent discovery (Mülke 2007). Extensive work has also gone into reconstructing the plots of these dramas, which has given a fuller view of Sophocles’ oeuvre. Papyri of the Seven have in a few places provided new readings (e.g. Aj. 699, OT 430) or welcome support for older readings that previously had only a tenuous foothold in the tradition (e.g. El. 995; cf. Grenfell 1919).

As regards the Seven, the key advance in this century was Roger Dawe’s publication of collations of 17 manuscripts (Dawe 1973–8), most previously unexamined. They contained several good new readings, and provided some manuscript support for many previous emendations. Dawe’s own edition (1975–9, 1984–5, 1996) made first use of this new material, although without any attempt to show why all these manuscripts needed to be cited as witnesses. Dawe also introduced a large number of conjectures into the text, including his own; many of his changes in this regard have not won widespread support. The most recent complete edition, Lloyd-Jones and Wilson (1990b), is generally more judicious on this front, but not always; for example, it displays a fondness for conjectures made by Lloyd-Jones in the 1950s that had not previously been welcomed into the text of an edition. Comparison of the editions by Dawe and by Lloyd-Jones and Wilson, both of them by reputed scholars with considerable expertise in this field and working with almost exactly the same material, is telling: they differ in more than a thousand places. Five hundred years since the first printed editions, and seven hundred years since the first modern scholarship, there is no sign of a consensus. Nevertheless, when we compare modern texts with those of ages past, it is clear that we are the beneficiaries of vast improvements thanks to the labors of many scholars over the years.

9 The Future

I end with three suggestions for future work on the transmission of Sophocles’ dramas:

1 We need a critical edition which: (a) makes full and careful use of the improved state of understanding of tragic language and meter that is the result of twentieth-century scholarship, which itself built on the insights of previous scholars; (b) considers afresh which manuscripts need to be cited alongside L; (c) shows no bias toward the conjectures of its editor; (d) is accompanied by a commentary that explains every textual decision, without taking any choice for granted; and (e) takes care to attribute conjectures correctly to their first proposers.

2 Our texts of the Sophoclean scholia are woefully inadequate for most of the plays and are in need of further study. At the moment, the most recent edition for four of the plays is over a century old, and relies almost wholly on a single manuscript.

3 The history of the transmission itself requires critical scrutiny, both for its own sake and as a means of better understanding the evidence for Sophocles’ writings. An investigation of Alexandrian scholarship on Sophocles and his fellow tragedians is a desideratum; so is an assessment of the contribution of Byzantine scholars. (Both depend in part on progress in editing the scholia.) Furthermore, the recent emergence of unpublished and suppressed material on Sophocles by scholars in the Renaissance and in later times whets the appetite in anticipation of future discoveries. Renaissance scholarship on Aeschylus has attracted much attention in recent years; perhaps scholars need to examine the history of Sophoclean criticism with a similar passion. The account offered by the present chapter merely sketches a rich field now ripe for cultivation.

Guide to Further Reading

For the history of scholarship, see Reynold and Wilson (1991), and for the history of Sophoclean scholarship in particular, see Jebb (1897): vii–xliv, and also Lloyd-Jones and Wilson (1990): 1–6. On editing texts, see West (1973). On types of corruption, see Diggle (1981): Index, s.v. manuscripts, errors of, and Diggle (1994).

On early transmission, see Pearson (1917), i: xxxii–xlvi and Allan (2008): 82–4. On the authenticity of early texts, see Revermann (2006): 66–95. On re-performances of tragedy, see Easterling (2006): 4–5 (with n. 11). On actors’ interpolations, see Revermann (2006): 76–83 and Allan (2008): 83 n. 372.

On Alexander of Aetolia, see Pfeiffer (1968): 106–7. On Ptolemy II’s acquisition, Prauscello (2006): 68–78. On Aristophanes of Byzantium, see Barrett (1964): 47–8 and Pfeiffer (1968): 192–6. On Aristarchus, see Pfeiffer (1968): 222–3 and Schironi (2004): fr. 70 (especially p. 530 n. 4). On Didymus, see Pfeiffer (1968): 277. On Pius, see Finglass (2011a) (on Aj. 143–5).

Concerning knowledge of Sophocles’ plays among ancient authors, see Pearson (1917), i: xlvi–xci. On Latin literature and Sophocles, see Holford-Strevens (1999).

For papyri of the seven plays, see Daris (2003): 97–9. For scholars’ names on papyri, McNamee (2007): 362–71.

Among editions of the ancient scholia, see De Marco (1952) for scholia on OC; Christodoulou (1977) for scholia on Ajax; Janz (2005) for scholia on Philoctetes; and Papageorgius (1888) for other scholia. See also Dickey (2007): 34–5. On the invention of scholia, see McNamee (2007): 79–92.

Since this chapter was written in 2009, a most important development has taken place: the publication in 2010 of excellent editions of the ancient scholia to Sophocles’ Electra and Trachiniae by G. A. Xenis (2010a, 2010b). See my review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, available at http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2011/2011-07-22.html.

For medieval scholia, see Longo (1971) on scholia to OT and Janz (2005) on scholia to Philoctetes. For other medieval scholia, see Dindorf (1852) – but Dindorf does not include Triclinius’s metrical scholia. Tessier (2005) contains these for the triad and Ant. (which he confusingly calls the ‘tetrad’ in the title of his book, a non-standard usage); for Tr., Phil., and OC, see Turnebus (1552), reprinted e.g. in Stephanus (1568) and in Erfurdt (1802–11). For Triclinius, see Tessier (1999). For Zacharias Callierges, see Chatzopoulou (2009): 85 n. 1.

For medieval manuscripts, see Turyn (1944 and 1952). For a facsimile of manuscript L, see Thompson and Jebb (1885).

For sixteenth-century editions, see Borza (2007).

For unpublished emendations by Scaliger, see Finglass (2009): 188–91; by Livineius, see Lloyd-Jones and Wilson (1990b): 269–75; by Auratus, see Masson (1887); by Bentley, see Bentley (1816); by Valckenaer and Pierson, see Finglass (2009): 194–202, 204–7; by Markland, see Finglass (2011b); by Porson, see Kidd (1815); by Elmsley, see Finglass (2007).

For the fragments, see Gruys (1981): 277–309 on Dirk Canter’s library. On other collectors, see Kassel (2005) and Harvey (2005). On Welcker, see Radt (1986) = (2002): 320–44. The main edition is Radt (1999). For a translation, see Lloyd-Jones (1996). For a commentary, see Pearson (1917), Sommerstein, Fitzpatrick, and Talboy (2006), and Sommerstein and Talboy (2011).

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Professor Alan Sommerstein for helpful comments.

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3

Sophocles’ Biography

Ruth Scodel

We know more about the life of Sophocles than we know about the lives of many other Greek poets. Still, we do not know very much. There is a biography of Sophocles in some manuscripts of his plays and another in the Byzantine encyclopedia Suda. In addition, anecdotes about him appear in various ancient authors. However, the biographical traditions about Greek poets, as recorded both in the surviving short formal biographies and in the anecdotes told by extant authors, tend to be almost useless as historical sources, although they are very valuable testimonies for how ancient readers thought about the authors. They are heavily based on inferences from the poetry itself and on jokes from comedy, neither of them used with critical sophistication, and many of the incidents they narrate are obviously folktales.

For the tragic poets, at least the rankings of the original performances at the Athenian City Dionysia and Lenaea were publicly recorded, so that, when an ancient source quotes a date, it is likely to be reliable. Unfortunately, we have very few such dates for Sophocles. His first production (and first victory) was in 468 BCE; Philoctetes was produced in 409 BCE; and Oedipus at Colonus was produced posthumously. Because Sophocles also held important public offices, we know something about his non-dramatic career. Because his acquaintance (perhaps friend), Ion of Chios (a tragedian and lyric poet), relayed some anecdotes about him in his book Visits (Epidemiai), and Athenaeus’ The Learned Banqueters (Deipnosophistai) includes an extended extract, we have some gossip that is at least contemporary and intended, unlike comedy, to be credible. Aristotle, too, relays some anecdotes about Sophocles, and these, while not contemporary, are at least close to his own time and reflect gossip rather than comedy or folktale.

We do not, however, have the kind of individual biographical information that is of real use for literary studies: we have no access to Sophocles’ inner life. From comedy, the fragments of Ion, and indeed from Sophocles’ political career, we see an immensely charming, successful, pious, and popular man. He lived about ninety years: in the first part of his career as a tragedian his most important competitor was Aeschylus, and for the later 50 years his chief rival was Euripides. Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs (Ranae), whose effects on literary history are hard to overestimate, depicts a Dionysus who goes to the Underworld to bring back Euripides because Sophocles would not agree to come – he was easy-going here and is easy-going there (Ra. 82) – and who then judges a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides for the chair of honor designated in the Underworld for the greatest tragedian. Sophocles, according to Aristophanes, was too gracious to challenge Aeschylus (ll. 788–90).

Being defined as the most genial of men and rarely being subjected to parody is not always the best treatment for a tragic poet. The comic poet Phrynichus said in his Muses (fr. 1 Meineke = fr. 31 Hock):

Blessed Sophocles, who died after a long life,

a fortunate and adroit man

who composed many fine tragedies

and had a good death, enduring nothing bad.

Sophocles may very well have suffered a variety of ordinary misfortunes: we do not know whether his mother died young, whether he lost siblings, or children, or a wife. He had a long and very successful career and had sons who survived him, which was enough to label him as fortunate and to allow his life to be sentimentalized. That he died shortly before Athens lost the Peloponnesian War would have been another reason to see him as blessed.

Suda names five sons of his: Iophon, Leosthenes, Ariston, Stephanus, and Menekleides; but the biography mentions only two, both attested elsewhere. Iophon won at the Dionysia in 435 BCE and came second in 428 BCE (Euripides won the first prize with the production that included Hippolytus, and Ion of Chios was third). Ariston, said to be illegitimate, had a son also named Sophocles, who produced Oedipus at Colonus after his grandfather’s death and won his first victory with his own plays in 396 BCE.

Sophocles’ biographical tradition has defined him as an unquestioned classic, obscuring the difficulty and strangeness of his work. Only Longinus (On the Sublime 33.5) among ancient critics points out that Sophocles’ style is daring, so that he achieves true sublimity when he succeeds, but sometimes he fails completely – unlike the reliable but less thrilling Ion of Chios.

The biography preserved in the manuscript tradition begins thus:

Sophocles, son of Sophilos, who was neither, as Aristoxenos asserts, a carpenter or a smith, nor, as Istrus claims, a knife-maker by craft, but maybe he owned slaves who worked as smiths or carpenters. For it is not likely that someone of such origin would have been judged deserving to serve as general with Pericles and Thucydides, the men of highest standing in the city. Neither would he have been allowed to go without attack from the comic poets, who did not leave even Pericles alone. (Vita 1–6)

Aristoxenos was a fourth-century Peripatetic philosopher and theorist of music. It is absolutely clear that he had no real information at all about Sophocles’ father apart from his name – and even the spelling of this name varies in the sources. Evidently, these guesses were not based on jokes from comedy, since the arguments depend on the absence of such jokes. So they are almost certainly inferences from the poetry: Aristoxenos thought that Sophocles’ use of metaphors from building and metal-working indicated direct knowledge of these skills. The inference from the absence of jokes in comedy is not unreasonable (and ancient biographers had a much larger body of comedies): since Sophocles obviously had an excellent education in poetry and music, since he served in public offices that were restricted to the wealthy, and since comedy never made fun of his origins, we can assume that his father was prosperous.

Istros, a Hellenistic biographer, said that, as a boy, Sophocles won crowns in both athletic and musical competitions. The biography says that he led a victory paean after the battle of Salamis, playing the lyre naked and anointed with oil (Vita 15–19). It is at least possible that boys’ victories and the performance of the paean would have been recorded in inscriptions, but it is also possible that these stories, too, simply give concrete form to the tradition’s sense of Sophocles as a versatile, successful, and patriotic man (and the details of the performance have a whiff of pederastic fantasy).

The sources vary about the date of his birth. Since the date of his death was well known (406/5 BCE), sources that give the length of his life imply a year of birth – and the possibilities go from 500/499 BCE to the seventy-third Olympiad, 488/485 BCE. Scholars typically assume the most commonly reported dates, 497/496 or 495/94 BCE. But, evidently, there was no record. There is a line and a half of elegaic verse quoted by Plutarch (An seni res publica gerenda sit 785b) as an epigrammation, a tiny epigram: Sophocles made a song for Herodotus when he [Sophocles] was fifty-five. This Herodotus is probably the historian, whose work Sophocles used, although the reference to Sophocles’ age has caused debate over whether the poem was addressed to a boy (Jacoby 1913: 233–4). The introductory poem to the song suggests that it was sent rather than performed; but, since Herodotus was in Athens sometime during the mid-440s and joined the colony at Thurii (probably at its foundation in 443 BCE), it is no help in dating.

Plutarch’s Life of Cimon (8.7) follows the account of Cimon’s popularity after he brought the bones of the hero Theseus from Scyros with an anecdote:

Sophocles, who was still young, had just entered his first production; there was intense rivalry among the spectators and they were grouped into two sides. So the archon Apsephion did not conduct the lottery to select the judges; but when Cimon and the other generals came into the theater, after they had performed the usual rites to the god, he would not allow them to leave but gave them the oath and forced them to sit and judge – there were ten, one from each tribe. The competition also through the standing of the judges went beyond rivalry. When Sophocles won, Aeschylus is said to have become very distressed and to have taken it badly; he did not stay in Athens for long, but in anger went off to Sicily, where he died, and was buried near Gela.

The dates of victories were known, so this story is likely to be based on that much fact (although some anecdotes about poets evidently ignored these available chronological facts). However, Aeschylus was victorious in 467 BCE with his Theban trilogy, and with the Oresteia in 458 BCE. He left Athens some time later, probably intending only a visit to Sicily.

It is an odd story. The decision to have the generals serve as judges is made before the judges’ names are selected from the pre-approved list, when the generals enter the theater – which means that the spectators are acutely excited before seeing anything. Although there was a sort of preview of the play