A NOTE ON THE TEXT OF SOPHOCLES

THIS BOOK contains an English translation, by Robert Fagles, of three plays which were first performed, before a Greek-speaking audience, in the fifth century B.C. The reader who consults the notes on pages 395- 419 will soon become aware that in many passages, some of them important for overall interpretation, there is scholarly disagreement about the words of the original Greek. This translation, though it follows in the main the text of A. C. Pearson, sometimes adopts a different reading—that of Sir Richard Jebb, for example, or the most recent editor, Roger Dawe. The text is not the only matter in dispute; lines are often assigned to different speakers, and stage directions (even such vital matters as exits and entrances) vary from one edition or translation to another. These problems stem from the extraordinary nature of the process by which the words of Sophocles have been preserved for over two thousand years.

He was not, in the modern sense, a “writer”; the official inscription commemorating the winner of the dramatic competition for the year 447 B.C., for example, says: “Sophocles was the teacher.” He taught his chorus their songs and his actors their lines; like Shakespeare, he was a playwright—not a “writer” but a “maker” of plays: author, composer, choreographer and director all in one. But he must have worked from a written version, and these manuscripts of his are the most likely source of the book texts we know were in circulation in late fifth-century Athens. These texts are the origin of the long, handwritten tradition which saved seven of his plays from oblivion so that they were available for Aldo Manuzio of Venice, who issued the first printed edition in 1502.

About the books which were produced, circulated privately and also bought and sold in fifth-century Athens we know very little more than the fact that manuscripts were circulated among friends and copies made for private use; copies were also made for sale by booksellers’ employees (probably slaves). In any such hand-copied tradition errors abound and tend to be perpetuated; in addition, the format used for recording dramatic texts was one which invited involuntary error on a large scale. We have no such manuscripts from Sophocles’ time, but fragments of papyrus books from Ptolemaic Egypt, the earliest dating from the third century B.C., give us an idea of what they must have been like. The lines of dialogue are arranged in columns, to be read from left to right and top to bottom. Words are not divided, and punctuation is almost nonexistent. Speakers are identified only at rare intervals; after such identification only change of speaker is marked—by a short dash under the first letters of the line where it occurs (if there is a space or a colon later in the line, the speaker changes there and not at the beginning).

Quite apart from the compounded errors and the deliberate omissions and interpolations which might occur in the book text, there was undoubtedly much distortion in the versions staged by the traveling theatrical companies which, in the fourth century, took the classics of Attic drama to every corner of the Greek world. Theatrical producers, as we know from the bizarre versions of Shakespeare’s plays performed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have no qualms when it comes to cutting or adding to suit the fashion of the time. By the second half of the fourth century such tampering with the classic texts seems to have become a matter of public concern in Athens, for in 330 B.C. the leading Athenian statesman, Lycurgus, proposed legislation designed to ensure that in Athens, if not elsewhere, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides would be staged in correct versions. The actors had to read over, with a city magistrate, the official text; no departures from it would be permitted. But we do not know what this official text was like; it may have contained interpolations and alterations that came into the text early and remained undetected.

What the situation obviously called for was editorial work on the part of scholars, but this was to take place not in the Athens of Lycurgus but in the following century and at Alexandria, the new city founded by Alexander in Egypt. Under the Macedonian dynasty which ruled Egypt after Alexander’s death, the great collections of the Alexandrian library were assembled, and the scholars and poets attached to it began the long task of comparing manuscripts and making commentaries. (King Ptolemy III, we are told, managed to acquire for the library the “official” Athenian copy of the tragic poets.) It is from these Alexandrian editions that our text derives; but they were based on a textual tradition which could easily have suffered major corruption, addition and omission in the years between the death of Sophocles in 406 and the law of Lycurgus in 330. It is this blank page in the history of the text which allows modern scholars to make a case, to take one famous example, for omitting lines 904-5 through 920 (993-1012 in this translation) in Antigone’s last speech.

The Alexandrian editions set a standard that helped to protect the dramatic texts from major interpolation and corruption. Meanwhile the danger of contamination from reckless theatrical adaptation lessened as performance of what were now ancient classics became a rare phenomenon. As with the passing of the years those classics became more ancient still, their words more difficult to understand, their content more alien to the religious and philosophical ideas of the times, demand for copies ceased; in the last centuries of the Roman Empire the bulk of the great legacy of Attic drama vanished forever as the last papyrus rolls disintegrated. A selection, however, was preserved, probably for use in schools: seven plays of Aeschylus, seven of Sophocles and—a reflection of his greater popularity in later ages—ten of Euripides. In the fifth century a.d., as the old Roman civilization collapsed in the West, knowledge of Greek was extinguished; Dante, who placed Homer in the limbo of the pagan poets in his great poem, could not have read the text of Homer even if he had seen a copy of it. But in the East, in the Greek-speaking empire of Byzantium, the selected tragic texts continued to be copied for school use, and papyrus was replaced by more durable parchment. By the tenth century A.D. the copyists had abandoned the ancient capital letters for the smaller cursive script of their own time, which observed word division and so improved legibility. The editors also replaced the old confusing signs for change of speakers with the modern system—an abbreviation of the character’s name before each new speech. In the late centuries of the Byzantine Empire there was a revival of scholarly interest in the ancient texts (it was at this time that an old manuscript containing nine more plays of Euripides was discovered). Scholarly editors produced editions of the extant remains of Greek tragedy in which the text was surrounded on all sides by selections from commentaries ancient and modern.

Meanwhile in Western Europe, especially in Italy, interest in ancient Greek literature was on the rise. Boccaccio, in the generation after Dante, studied the language under a native Greek teacher, and, as demand increased, manuscripts of the Greek classics were brought across the Adriatic in increasing number. As the Turkish armies approached the capital of Byzantium, scholars fled to the West to interpret and teach. When at last the city fell to the Turks in 1453, manuscripts of almost all the Greek literature we now possess were already circulating in handwritten copies in the West; in the course of the sixteenth century the first printed editions appeared. Since the publication of those first editions, which, for the most part, simply reproduced the particular manuscript the printer had at his disposal, thousands of scholars have worked to clear the text of the errors and corruptions that are the inevitable product of two thousand years of handwritten transmission. Determination of the dates and relationships of the more than two hundred manuscripts which survive, comparison of variant readings, careful study of the prevalent types of error to be found in the work of Byzantine copyists, a constantly refined understanding of the grammar, syntax and characteristic idioms of fifth-century Greek, and an exact analysis of the subtle and complicated metric patterns of the choral odes—all these scholarly disciplines have combined to produce a Greek text of which we can say with some confidence, that even though many disputed (and some desperately corrupt) passages remain, it is closer to the text of the Sophoclean original than anything that has been available since the first five centuries before the birth of Christ.