For a clear and readable discussion of the way ancient texts come down to us and the dangers to which they are exposed see Reynolds and Wilson 1991. Readers interested in the principles of textual criticism as applied to Greek and Latin texts are well provided for in West 1973. Paul Maas’s earlier treatment of this same subject (Maas 1958) discusses in greater detail how to draw up a family tree of manuscripts or stemma codicum, and how to use it to eliminate readings as secondary. For other histories of the transmission of Greek tragic texts see Barrett 1964, 45-90, and Mastronarde 1994, 39-52.
The subject of books and their readers in the ancient Greek world is discussed in Easterling and Knox 1985, 1-41. Samples of ancient papyrus fragments from antiquity are reproduced in Turner 1987. Specimens of Greek bookhands from later antiquity through the Middle Ages can be seen in Barbour 1981. Antiquity’s great “information technology” breakthrough, the invention of the codex, is the subject of Roberts and Skeat 1983. The work of the scholars of the Museum in Alexandria is discussed in Pfeiffer 1968, Fraser 1972, chapter 8, and Griffith 1977, 225-45. Canfora 1989 examines the vicissitudes of the library at Alexandria. Scholarship under the Byzantine Empire and the revival of Greek learning in Renaissance Italy are described in N. G. Wilson 1983 and 1992. Important work on the manuscript tradition of Aeschylus is in Dawe 1964, on that of Sophocles in Dawe 1973-78, and on that of Euripides in Zuntz 1965. This last includes an intriguing bit of detective work (a presumed mark of punctuation turned out to be a piece of straw) that proved once and for all the exact relationship between two manuscripts of Euripides, something with large consequences for the constitution of the text. (The straw is preserved in the Laurentian Library in Florence for future scholars to consult.)
Countless scholars, writing in most of the modern languages of Europe and in Latin, have identified corruptions in Greek tragedy and tried to fix them by conjecture. For examples of this activity carried out with style and panache see Jackson 1955 and Housman 1972, 181208, the latter a bit acid for some tastes. For an eloquent refutation of the view that further progress in this field is impossible, see West 1990b, 369-72.
A Companion to Greek Tragedy Edited by Justina Gregory Copyright © 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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