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EURIPIDES, ORESTES 1246*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2014

C. Michael Sampson
C. Michael Sampson*
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba
*
[email protected]
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Extract

Although the manuscript tradition of Euripides’ Orestes is unanimous in preserving the reading Μυκηνίδες ὦ φίλαι at line 1246, recent editors have increasingly preferred the emendation Μυκηνίδες ὦ φίλ⟨ι⟩αι, first suggested by Gottfried Hermann in 1841. Thanks to the recent publication of new Michigan papyri, that emendation can now be unreservedly accepted.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , May 2014 , pp. 403 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Cassandra Borges and Mark Joyal for their advice in preparing this note. Any errors that remain are my own.

References

1 Hermann, G. (ed.), Euripidis Orestes (Leipzig, 1841)Google Scholar, 123 on line 1239 (= 1246 Diggle). Of twentieth-century editors, the emendation is endorsed by Di Benedetto, V. (ed.), Euripidis Orestes (Florence, 1965)Google Scholar; Chapouthier, F. (ed.), Euripide: Oreste, Tome VI1, tr. Méridier, L. (Paris, 1959)Google Scholar; Biehl, W. (ed.), Euripides: Orestes (Leipzig, 1975)Google Scholar; West, M.L. (ed.), Euripides: Orestes (Warminster, 1987)Google Scholar; Diggle, J. (ed.), Euripidis Fabulae, Tomus III (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar and Kovacs, D. (ed.), Euripides V: Helen, Phoenician Women, Orestes (Cambridge, MA, 2002)Google Scholar. The transmitted text, by contrast, is retained by Murray, G. (ed.), Euripidis Fabulae, Tomus III (Oxford, 1913)Google Scholar. Willink, C.W., Euripides: Orestes (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar, prints Murray's text but endorses the emendation in his commentary (287–8) on 1246–65 = 1266–85.

2 Borges, C. and Sampson, C.M., New Literary Papyri from the Michigan Collection: Mythographic Lyric and a Catalogue of Poetic First Lines (Ann Arbor, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 ‘Scripsi φίλιαι pro vulgato φίλαι’: Hermann (n. 1), 123 on 1239.

4 On the Thoman recensions, see Turyn, A., The Byzantine Manuscript Tradition of the Tragedies of Euripides (Urbana, 1957), 165–87Google Scholar, and on the line in question, esp. 174; cf. the objections and corrections of Diggle, J., The Textual Tradition of Euripides’ Orestes (Oxford, 1991), 81–7.Google Scholar

5 Following Dindorf, L. (ed.), Euripides. Orestes (Leipzig, 1825)Google Scholar, editors more typically print enclitic νυν in place of the transmitted ἑλίσσετε νῦν βλέφαρα.

6 As Di Benedetto (n. 1) notes regarding 1246, the resolution in the final syllable of 1266 in responsion to the diphthong -αι is supported by Ion 463 = 483, IT 1089 = 1106, and Phoen. 208 = 220 (p. 238). Diggle (n. 4), 85 is far less generous: of the fifty-one so-called Thoman interpolations listed by Turyn (n. 4), 172–5, this is one of two that he terms ‘trivializing’; ‘Evidence of rational thought is almost non-existent.’

7 Di Benedetto (n. 1), 238 on 1246. Willink (n. 1), 287–8 on 1246–65 = 1266–85, agrees that the telesillian ‘is contextually less likely’ and argues that its ‘resolution at verse end, before syntactical break and change of metre, is definitely anomalous’.

8 See Borges and Sampson (n. 2) on P.Mich. inv. 3250c (recto) ii.8 (p. 19).

9 See Borges and Sampson (n. 2) 19–20, 29–31.