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Seneca, Troades 1109–10
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
The English critic Bentley first proposed emending the transmitted text of Troades 1109 from teget, the reading of all manuscripts, to leget. Bentley's suggestion subsequently gained wide acceptance and was printed in many later editions of the tragedies, including those of Leo (1878–9), Richter (1902), and Moricca (1917–23). More recent critics have favoured retention of the manuscript reading. Carlsson, for example, underlines the distinctive alliterative quality which the reading teget imparts to the line; and the latest commentator on the Troades has produced a spirited defence of the transmitted text:
Andromache has not yet realized the condition of the corpse, and is thinking, not of gathering up fragmented limbs, but merely of the formal requirements of burial. What Carlsson (I p. 50) defends on grounds of alliteration should be retained on grounds of sense: teget tumuloque tradet is a doublet of which the second part makes clear the religious meaning of the first, more general, word.
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References
1 Bentley never produced an edition of the tragedies. However, he did leave marginal jottings on the text which have been collected by Hedecke, E. in Studia Bentleiana fasc. 2 (Seneca Bentleianus) (Freienwaldiae, 1899), pp. 9ffGoogle Scholar.
2 Carlsson, G., Die Ueberlieferung der Seneca-Tragoedien (Lund, 1926), p. 50Google Scholar. For an opposing view, see Zwierlein, Otto, Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas (Meisenheim am Glan, 1966), p. 193Google Scholar.
3 Fantham, E., Seneca's Troades. A Literary Introduction with Text, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton, 1982), p. 374Google Scholar. Zwierlein, in his new Oxford Classical Text of the Tragoediae (1986)Google Scholar retains the manuscript reading teget. In an earlier discussion of the passage (Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft N.F. 4 (1978), 152 n. 51Google Scholar), he has also argued in favour of teget: ‘In Tro 1109 verteidigt Axelson das überlieferte artus teget tumuloque tradet als einen Doppelausdruck analog Verg. Aen. 6.152. Artus leget (Bentley) würde die folgende Schilderung – so führt er aus – unpassend antizipieren: Andromache möchte sich ja gern vorstellen, dass die Leiche des Astyanax wenigstens heil ist.’