Sophocles: Oedipus the King ed. by P. J. Finglass (review)

Patrick Finglass, who has previously edited Sophocles’ Electra and Ajax in this series, now gives us an excellent edition of Oedipus the King. An introduction discusses briefly the play’s date (placing it likely in the 430s, with the 440s and 420s also plausible) and production and staging. A longer discussion of myth and originality surveys earlier treatments of the myth, noting the effect of Sophoclean innovations, such as the plague, Oedipus’ journey to Delphi, and the prospect of his exile at the end. In place of an overview of the play, we have a section, “What Kind of a Play is This?” on some of its features, such as the prologue as suppliant-drama, the theme of recognition, and the plot motif of the foundling; an implicit thesis is Apollo’s control of events, impelling an innocent Oedipus toward his ruin. Finally, Finglass offers a brief and masterful overview of the text’s transmission from Aristotle to Lloyd-Jones and Wilson.

Finglass prints a text of OT that hews fairly close to that of Lloyd-Jones and Wilson, but is slightly more conservative. His preface reports 56 substantive differences from the OCT (i.e., excluding orthography), 13 with major implications for interpretation; in most of these cases, Finglass prints the received text. Among the remainder, most worthy of note is a careful combination of previous emendations restoring sense at the crux in 892–893/4. Evident in the apparatus, and detailed more fully in the commentary, is an exhaustive study of attributions. In countless places Finglass either finds an earlier source for a given emendation or corrects the attribution in the OCT; furthermore, the commentary frequently specifies the date and venue of an emendation.

The commentary has a slightly unusual format, taking as lemmas not words or phrases but short passages, typically 1 to 4 lines each, followed by a translation. The notes together thus include a complete Greek text and English translation. A disadvantage is that it can be hard to find comment on a given word or phrase in the long discussion of a passage. The commentary concerns itself above all with textual issues, giving a full account of variants in the manuscript tradition, as well as a careful accounting of relevant emendations. The usage of particles is thoroughly parsed, and syntactical and lexical points are elucidated with extensive lists of parallels. Dramatic and thematic issues are generally addressed in the introduction to a section; for example, the introduction to the fourth episode shows how the entrance of the Herdsman repeats and varies details of the earlier entrance of the messenger from Corinth, and the first episode is prefaced with a discussion of Greek religious and civic sanctions against murderers. There is relatively little attention to that elusive “Sophoclean” diction.

In general, Finglass is more attentive to the surface of language than its broader context. For example, the first stasimon begins with a striking image in which the Delphian rock (Δελφὶς . . . πέτρα) speaks out against the criminal, who will be hunted down by Apollo. Here Finglass notes, “For ‘rocky Delphi’ cf. . . .” with a series of parallels confirming the literary topos. But more than a topos, the bold language reflects the striking topography of Delphi, as Jebb indicates in a lengthy note on the rocky terrain. And the context is cultural as well as topographic. Herodotus famously reports how the sanctuary at Delphi warded off the Persians as rocks hurled themselves down on the invaders (8.36–39); Sophocles paints a similar picture in which the Delphian rock takes action against the offender. Elsewhere, the messenger’s speech describing the death of Jocasta and the blinding of Oedipus is marked at the beginning, as Finglass notes, by anaphora, and toward the end by alliteration. Yet these and other effects serve a larger purpose in creating an imagined offstage scene, as Jebb understood in describing the domestic architecture through which the frenzied Oedipus ran, from...