We have no manuscripts in Euripides’ hand, or going back anywhere near his own time. If we had, they would be difficult to decipher, and would lack many aids which the modern reader takes for granted: stage directions, punctuation, clear indications of change of speaker, regular divisions between lines and even between words. In fact, although some parts of his plays, mostly short extracts, survive in papyri from the earliest centuries ad, our complete manuscripts of the plays translated in this volume go back no further than the tenth century. Moreover, the textual evidence for the various plays differs greatly in quantity. Three plays were especially popular in later antiquity, namely the Hecabe, the Phoenician Women and the Orestes (the so-called ‘Byzantine triad’). These survive in more than 200 manuscripts. Others, including The Children of Heracles, are represented in only one manuscript and its derivatives. The Alcestis, the Medea and the Hippolytus fall in between, each surviving in a number of manuscripts of varying date. In a different category come the many quotations from Euripides in other classical authors, which sometimes preserve different readings from those in the direct tradition of Euripidean manuscripts.
This situation is not unusual in the history of classical authors. No ancient dramatist’s work survives in his own hand: in all cases we are dealing with a text transmitted by one route or several, and copied many times over. In an age which knew nothing of the printing-press, far less the Xerox machine, all copying had to be done by hand, every copy in a sense a new version. The opportunities for corruption of the text – that is, the introduction of error – were numerous. The reasons for such corruption include simple miscopying or misunderstanding by the scribe, omission or addition of passages by actors in later productions, accidental inclusion of marginal notes or quotations from other plays, and very occasionally bowdlerization of ‘unsuitable’ passages. Problems of this kind were already recognized in antiquity: efforts were made to stabilize the texts of the tragedians in fourth-century BC Athens, and the ancient commentaries or ‘scholia’ to some of Euripides’ plays make frequent comments on textual matters, for instance remarking that a line is ‘not to be found’ in some of their early manuscripts, now lost to us. In the same way, when a modern scholar produces an edition of a Euripidean play, there are many places where he or she must decide between different versions given in different manuscripts. Sometimes the choice will be easy: one version may be unmetrical, ungrammatical or meaningless. But often the decision may be more difficult, and in many cases it is clear that no manuscript preserves the lines in question in the correct form. Hence, the editor must either reconstruct Euripides’ authentic text by ‘conjecture’, or indicate that the passage is insolubly corrupt, a conclusion normally signalled by printing daggers (‘obeli’) on either side of the perplexing passage.
A translator is in a slightly more fortunate position than an editor. The editor must make a decision on what to print at every point, and uncertainty may prevail as to the exact wording even when the overall sense is fairly clear. In this translation James Diggle’s excellent Oxford Classical Text has normally been followed: when he has marked a word or phrase as probably or certainly corrupt, wehave usually adopted a conjectural reading, whether made by him or by a previous editor, even though we often agree that there can be no certainty that this is what Euripides actually wrote. In cases where the corruption is more extensive, wehave tried to give a probable idea of the train of thought. These problems arise particularly in choral and other lyric passages, where the language is less close to everyday speech, and where unusual metre and dialect often misled copyists.
Many of the smaller problems involving variations of words or uncertainty over phrasing will be unlikely to cause difficulties to readers of this translation. More noticeable are the occasional places where it seems that something has dropped out of the text; usually this can be explained by the accidents of miscopying or by damage to some of the manuscripts from which our texts descend. The problem is not acute in these plays, but there are several gaps in our text of The Children of Heracles, and one important possible case must be suspected at the end of the play, where the chorus’s rapid assent to Alcmene’s proposal seems unnatural, and brings events to a surprisingly sudden conclusion. In the notes to each play problems of this kind are usually indicated.
The other main problem which affects criticism of Euripides is that of interpolation. This is the term used to describe the inclusion of alien material in the original text, expanding and elaborating on the author’s words. Sometimes the new material betrays itself by its very unsuitability to the context, and we may suppose that it has been included by accident (for instance, parallels from other plays were sometimes copied out in the margin, then found their way into the text in subsequent copies). Sometimes lines may be present in one manuscript but omitted in others: if they seem superfluous in themselves, they may well be a later addition. Sometimes a speech may seem unnecessarily wordy, and we may suspect that it has been expanded without feeling certain; here textual criticism merges with literary judgement. It has often been suggested that some passages in the plays have been ‘padded out’ by actors seeking to improve their parts: although this tendency has probably been exaggerated, it would be a mistake to rule it out altogether. One speech which has fallen under suspicion on these grounds is Medea’s famous soliloquy as she wavers over the killing of her children (Medea 1019–80: the boldest critics would excise all of 1056–80). On the whole we agree with Diggle’s judgements in these four plays, and have omitted from the translation a fair number of short passages which he considers interpolated. In the case of Medea’s soliloquy, however, expert authorities have been unable to reach agreement, and in view of the central importance of the scene, we have included the whole of the speech despite the doubts which may be reasonably felt as to the authenticity of parts.
FURTHER READING
W. S. Barrett, Euripides: Hippolytus (Oxford 1964), pp. 45–84 (a detailed account, requiring some knowledge of Greek and technical terms).
C. Collard, Euripides, Greece and Rome New Surveys 14 (Oxford 1981), p. 3 (a good one-page summary with bibliography).
L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (3rd edn, Oxford 1991).
M. L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (Stuttgart 1973), part I.