OUP (2025) h/b 249pp £120 (ISBN 9780198932901)
This book follows the pattern set by its predecessor Studies on the Text of Euripides (1981), and is published simultaneously with the Oxford Classical Text. In his Preface D. lists the (rather surprising) number of editions and/or commentaries which have appeared in recent years on the six plays which are the subject of the book; only Supplices and Electra are omitted from the commentaries, though Denniston’s ageing Electra (1939) retains (in this reviewer’s opinion) some value.
The six plays (Supplices, Electra, Heracles, Troades, Ipigeneia in Tauris, Ion) are ‘transmitted in a much more corrupt state than most of those in Volumes i and iii’. D. comments that an editor ‘must make a choice in virtually every line’ and adds that ‘a recent editor (of Troades) records that his text differs from mine in about 100 places; a second editor (of Ion) that his text differs in about 175 place … In many cases I believe that I can show that the (other) editor has chosen less well.’
This is a book of wholly exceptional quality. which demonstrates—if demonstration were needed—the surely unsurpassed familiarity with the language (and metres) of Euripides which D. possesses, aided by his autopsy of the manuscript tradition (an autopsy which was not carried out by the editor of the first OCT of Euripides: Page in particular was unhappy in being compelled to use that edition for his Medea). Problems in the six plays are examined in minute detail (occasionally necessitating the reviewer to use a magnifying glass); while it is not essential for readers to acquaint themselves or possess other works by D., it may at least be useful to have at hand the translations by Kovacs for the Loeb Library, given the frequency with which D. engages with that scholar.
Inevitably, a work of such minute details places demands on the reader. A less demanding instance is found at Electra 112-113 where for over 2000 years scholars have remained unconcerned by the word ἦρα (?ὧρα) seemingly standing alone as a one-word parenthesis, meaning ‘it’s the (right) time’: D. accepts Willink’s neat conjecture ὠδαῖ and eliminates the glaring hiatus in the next line by transposing, with Kovacs, κατακλαίουσα with the second ἔμβα. (When your reviewer as a schoolboy expressed puzzlement over the lines, he was firmly told to keep his comments to himself—at least until he knew as much Greek as Denniston.)
A more important case is to be seen at Electra, Hypothesis, line 4, where the subject of the admission of anapaests in the iambic trimeter is at issue (in general, anapaests are admitted from the second to fifth feet only if they are proper names containing a choriamb, i.e. adjectives formed from proper names are not admissible). D. has tabulated all anapaests created by proper names and by adjectives formed from them; they amount to approximately 90 (a few cases are dubious). There are also approximately seven cases which violate the rules. D. shows that ᾿Ιλιάδι is not offensive as a line-ending—which implies that the proposed correction, Elmsley’s ᾿Ιδαίᾳ (accepted by Kovacs) is a ‘strong but not watertight case’, and D.’s proposed change is not ‘compulsory’. A less important point concerning enjambment (the so-called Schema Sophocleum) is raised at Troades 702-5: does Euripides use it? The answer is ‘yes’, and of course D. gives chapter and verse, gently chiding Kovacs en route.
At Troades 737 a dispute arises between D. and Kovacs in which Kovacs opposes D. for defending the transmitted κεκτημένη (which he had himself accepted earlier) rather than κεχρημένη, advocated by Hartung: the argument hinges on the different usages of the two verbs, D. adding that it would serve no good purpose to adduce Hiketides 1035 or Andromache 242: Kovacs, however, does adduce them—but they are present tenses, not the needed perfects, and do not have the required adverbs or sense. These cases, small as they are, help to demonstrate D.’s minute eye for detail and ability to call up relevant instances (and, on occasion, their absence when needed). Advances in our texts are not spectacular, but, as Housman observed, ‘accuracy is a duty, not a virtue’, and although there is a very long list of passages discussed, only about a dozen of them involve the introduction of a new conjecture. D.’s honesty is to be seen at (e.g.) Troades 817, where he lists the ‘valid’ objections raised by Kovacs and Barlow against D.’s own conjecture at that line, and admits to being wrong to describe another conjecture in line 817 as ‘inapposite’. One might have hoped for at least occasional advances from such papyri as have content from Euripidean plays, but nothing of real value emerges (your reviewer permitted himself a sardonic smile when reading (note 47, p.156). that ‘The papyrus is exceptionally difficult to read and the dotted letters are not so much suggested by the visible traces as not incompatible with them’—not, as it happens, in a papyrus of any of the six plays discussed by D. here.
The foregoing cannot of course claim to be the full review which this book deserves and will most certainly receive wherever space is not an issue (after all, the number of line references to Euripides in the relevant index runs well into three figures): rather, it is a homage to a scholar of exceptional distinction, whose work has, time after time, led us to a more refined text and fuller understanding of what Euripides was writing. The book could be said to have a distant, but also distinguished ancestry in John Jackson’s Marginalia Scaenica, which appeared, Fraenkelio introducente et fortiter approbante in 1955. [D. does show acquaintance with this book: Jackson was writing in personal circumstances and location which, as Fraenkel tactfully shows, were far from conducive to scholarship.] The book under notice costs £120, although I have seen it offered at over £150: it is worth every penny.
Colin Leach