Contributi critici sul testo di Eschilo: Ecdotica ed esegesi ed. by Matteo Taufer (review)

The present volume represents the remarkably swift publication of papers presented at an international conference on Aeschylus held in Trento in May 2011. Included are Bernhard Zimmermann’s keynote address (in Italian translation) and seventeen papers devoted to the text of the Athenian dramatist whose final resting place is in Sicily. With the exception of Pierre Judet de La Combe’s French contribution, all the papers are in Italian (one, Garriga’s, was translated, presumably from Catalan). Each paper is accompanied by an abstract in English.

Many of the papers are narrowly focused on matters of text or interpretation and concern themselves with a small number of specific passages. The authors are very thorough in considering the work of previous scholars; indeed, some papers are scarcely more than exhaustive doxographies with little new to contribute. Even some of the more successful papers are concerned solely to argue in support of a view that has been advocated previously. For example, Maria Pia Pattoni spends a dozen pages discussing two words in Prometheus, arguing persuasively in favor of the meaning “shrieking loudly” for ἀκραγεῖς (803) and defending the manuscript reading ἄβατον (2) against ἄβροτον, which is found in the indirect tradition and is read by most modern editors. Although she devotes more space than necessary to showing how appropriate ἄβατον is to the context, which no one ever doubted, she in fact makes a good, but not entirely convincing, case for returning to the reading generally adopted by editors before Porson. Part of Pattoni’s argument involves noting the similarity between the opening of Prometheus and that of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, where ἄστιπτος (2) ≈ ἄβατος, but she does not consider the significance of the fact that Sophocles’ text reads βροτοῖς ἄστιπτος. In the end, she cannot account for the existence of the variant reading beyond referring to Paley, who cites Supplices 287, 617, and 691 for erroneous insertion of rho (cf. also Eumenides 450, 452, 907) into manuscripts of Aeschylus. But it is not the manuscripts of Aeschylus that exhibit ἄβροτον; rather it is the scholia to Homer, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes.

Devotion to the reading of the manuscripts is characteristic of several of the papers in the collection, among the best of which is Enrico Medda’s learned piece questioning the usual practice of adopting the emendation ἀκόρετος for ἀκόρεστος in lines 1117 and 1143 of Agamemnon. Medda is right to note that it is questionable methodology to introduce (twice) a form that is not otherwise attested. But he defends the manuscript reading in both lines at the cost of (twice) accepting two short syllables responding to a single short at the start of a dochmius, mute plus liquid making position in dochmiacs, and questionable grammar in taking a dative with πίπτειν as conveying simultaneously the notion of movement toward and lying on the object expressed by the dative. By contrast, reading ἀκόρετος and <ἐν> ἐνύδρῳ (1128) removes all these difficulties.

The most interesting and engaging contribution is in fact not about Aeschylus, but concerns the spurious end of Seven Against Thebes. Pierre Judet de La Combe sets out to examine the poetic intentions of the dramatist who composed the ending, without adopting the evaluative attitude normally found among philologists who denigrate the ending in contrast to the “authentic” portions of the play. He finds that the later poet was concerned not to effect a radical change to the Aeschylean original, but attempted to reassert the values of Aeschylus’ play in response to Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripides’ Phoenissae.

I regret that I cannot express greater enthusiasm for the papers in this collection. In his own contribution on the text of Prometheus, the editor documents some inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the apparatus critici of West and Page and argues that there is need of a full collation of all manuscripts of the play. Similarly, Renzo Tossi calls for a new, comprehensive edition of the scholia to Aeschylus, based on a...