rise to a controversy between two very eminent Greek Scholars and Professors, Oed. Tyr. 44-5 and Antig. 31-2.5 In such cases ethical or logical considerations, consistency with character and circumstances, and the admitted usages of language, are the only guides we can have in coming to a decision.

As there are some minds which are cautious almost to a fault, so there are others in which a desire to strike out new and clever emendations becomes a habit and almost a passion. I have no doubt at all that, like other mental habits, it actually grows upon one. Those who are possessed of this feeling or this ambition try their skill upon every passage which presents the smallest departure from a rigid regularity. And in order to extol the merit and the value of the conjecture, they naturally greatly exaggerate the difficulty of the vulgate reading. Thus in time they contract, as Mr. Palmer says, “a prejudice in favour of doubt." Editions of Greek authors based on these principles are invariably ephemeral. The very next editor probably rejects all the changes introduced, and goes back to the readings of the MSS. and the scholia. To produce a really good edition of such a poet as Sophocles,―great and interesting as he ever must be to all who have a feeling for humanity combined with a taste for literature, but still more great and much more interesting to the accomplished Greek scholar,—the most refined judgment, the most chastened poetic sense, the most intimate knowledge of tragic diction, are constantly called into play. A very sound acquaintance with the facts of the language generally, and also of the particular dialect and idioms of that branch of it which prevailed at Athens in the time of Pericles, is a not less necessary qualification."

The highest faculty in the critic of a Greek Play is not

5 Journal of Philology, iv. p. 182 seqq., and v. p. 1 seqq.

6 Pref. to Oed. Col. p. vi. I quite agree with Prof. Campbell (Preface, p. xiv), "It is when we approach the language of Sophocles with alien preconceptions, and view it through the foreign medium of a grammar-laden consciousness, that this and much else in Greek appears crooked and obscure."

7 On this subject see the important remarks of Professor Kennedy in Studia Sophoclea, i. p. vii-ix (Introduction).

ingenuity, but discretion. And mere ingenuity is something different from acuteness. The former has little to do with judgment, while the latter partakes largely of that sense of propriety which knows what ought to be said, as well as of that linguistic skill which can prono unce with something like certainty at least what might have been said. Mere guesses very often indeed violate the first conditions of a reasonable probability. I could quote hundreds of so-called "emendations" of the text of Sophocles, against which I should myself be inclined to write the nigrum theta, "Impossible." There are hundreds more of which I should say "possible," but which, if I thought them worth recording in a note, I should never think of admitting into the text; there are a good many which I should recommend for special consideration as "plausible;" and lastly, there are many which carry a probability so strong, and show a fitness so evident, or depend on such well-established principles and precedents of palaeography, that their admission can hardly be a matter of much doubt.

On the authority of our existing MSS. much might be said, but any remarks on the subject would not easily be expressed in brief. My own opinion is, that the authors of the Attic tragedies wrote their compositions on wooden tablets (πívakes), perhaps overlaid with wax; that these, the autograph copies, were laid up in the archives of the state; and that from them, with the authentication and brief history of each play from the didascaliae or literary records, the Alexandrine scholars, in an age when there was a great demand for a written literature, made or obtained their transcripts. I have had some experience in collating Greek MSS., and my own opinion of their general care and fidelity is by no means an unfavourable one. Interpolations of glosses and substitutions of words on the authority or by the caprice of early grammarians do undoubtedly occur;

8 "We are often justified in saying, Sophocles may have written what we find: he cannot have written what is proposed instead. It has not the Sophoclean colouring; it is like a raw touch on a picture ill-restored." Prof. Campbell, Essay," p. 107.

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but I do not myself believe that our MSS. of the Greek plays are corrupt to anything like the extent that some have supposed. But opinions on this subject differ somewhat widely. Hermann, on Elmsley's Medea, (Pars ii. init.) observes, "Est haec communis sors eorum qui arti criticae operam dant, ut initio nihil non corruptum esse suspicentur; ubi autem maturuit scientia, paullatim intelligunt, multo minus corruptos ad nos pervenisse veteres scriptores, quam a criticis esse corruptos." Commenting on this passage (quoted by me in the Preface to Aeschylus, p. vii, note), Professor Kennedy remarks, “Our experience bears an opposite testimony. During the task of editing [the Agamemnon] we think we have seen more corruption than we suspected before." On the other hand Prof. Conington says, "In general I may say that the result of my experience has been to make me think more highly of the MSS. and less highly of editorial ingenuity." Mr. Blaydes observes of the MSS. of Sophocles, that "in a multitude of passages they all combine in giving what is either palpably wrong or extremely suspicious."

2

3

The pleasing dream of a gradual recovery of the genuine texts by the process of emending by the light of our increasing knowledge, does not hold out much encouragement to those who believe in the extensive depravation of the present MSS. Texts founded on such a theory are as shifting and ephemeral as quicksands. For, as Prof. Conington well remarks, "the question is not simply, as some appear to think, between two readings, neither, doubtless, the product of the author, the one making sense, the other nonsense, but between a reading which, if not genuine, is the wreck of the genuine one, and another, which is confessedly only a makeshift till the genuine one be found.” Hence, although any number of conjectures may fairly be offered in notes, an editor should be very chary of altering the text

9 Addenda to the Agamemnon, p. 208.

1 Preface to Choeph. p. viii.

2 Preface to Philoctetes, p. iv. Cobet (Var. Lect. p. xxiv) goes further, and disparages the whole host of ordinary MSS. as "nulli rei utiles et contemnendi." 3 Preface to Choeph. p. ix.

without very sound reasons, or a very high probability in his favour.

4

One of the most earnest and eloquent supporters of conjectural criticism, and one of the most successful in the practice of it, is Prof. C. G. Cobet, the well-known author of Variae Lectiones, Novae Lectiones, and Miscellanea Critica. Admitting 1 that it is not only the "imperita multitudo," but "bona pars eruditorum" who hold in dislike this arbitrary alteration of the ancient texts, he nevertheless pleads for the necessity of it, if the ancient writers are to be properly understood. "Nihil est sanae rationi perniciosius quam mature assuefieri id, quod male sanum et absurdum est, inepte et temere interpretando concoquere et ferre, nonnunquam et probare et admirari, et tamdiu iudicio suo vim inferre donec hebescat et tandem depravatum et obtusum omnia quae propter vitium intelligi non possunt, nullo negotio sibi explicare posse videatur." He points (and this is a favourite argument with critics of his school) to the great number of generally accepted corrections which now find a place in our best texts, and asks whether any one seriously thinks that all the errors that have been accumulated through ages have yet been removed? Perhaps a not unreasonable answer to this would be, that the flagrant and palpable errors having been cleared away, not much is left except to guesses of that wild and purely tentative kind that carry no serious conviction to critics of the more sober, or as some would say, of the more timid school. The canon which he lays down for "safe" criticism is this; "to propose nothing that cannot be defended by an example from a good author; and to show that transcribers do habitually make mistakes in the same word and in precisely the same way." Of the existing Greek MSS. he has as bad an opinion as Mr. Blaydes: "nullus superest liber MS. quantumvis antiquus et integer, qui non sit passim et

4 Var. Lect. ed. 2 (1873), p. viii.

5 Ibid. p. ix. This is what Mr. Blaydes calls (Pref. p. xxvii) "scrupulously adhering to mumpsimus, and not having sumpsimus at any price."

6 Ibid. p. xiii.

vitiosis scripturis commaculatus et lacunis hians et alienis additamentis interpolatus: optimus ille est, qui minimis urgetur.”▾

In truth, the higher criticism of Greek tragedy is like that of pictures, statuary, or any other branch of the fine arts. One must be educated to it, and have learnt from early youth the methods and the points, the beauties and the weaknesses, the harmonious and the harsh in this kind of composition, according to the standard of the Attic ear. A person who takes to Greek late in life, and has never gone through the much ridiculed school-discipline of writing iambics, does not usually succeed as a critic. He is too fond of reducing tragic diction to commonplaces; he does not see that exactness of expression is often interfered with by the emotion of the speaker, by metrical necessities, by suppressing some idea that formed part of the train of thought; perhaps too he does not make allowance for irregularities which are actually artificial and intentional, which most certainly seems the practice of Sophocles. He did not like to seem common-place; indeed, the tragics generally, as Cobet has well observed," "lubenter usurpant ex Atticis [Attico sermone] ea quae non essent toti plebi in ore." Pedantry and affectation would be too strong words to apply to such a poet as Sophocles; yet my long study of the author emboldens me to say, that a sophistical and rhetorical quaintness was not displeasing to him. Involved idioms, the meaning of which is not at once obvious, were a studied part of his art. This indeed is precisely what we see, and in a very exaggerated form, in the later dialogues of Plato, the Philebus, Sophistes, and Politicus.1

On the relative merits of the MSS. of Sophocles not a word remains to be said after the very full and learned estimate and

7 Ibid. p. xxiii. To my mind, this is a somewhat random and exaggerated style of writing.

s I can hardly understand how Mr. Blaydes can propose to read in Phil. 959, póvov dè púσiov póvov tíow táλas, as "a more harmonious arrangement" than the vulgate φόνον φόνου δὲ ῥύσιον τίσω τάλας.

9 Var. Lect. p. 338.

1 For myself, I should hardly say, so decidedly as Prof. Campbell (Preface, p. xiii), that to attribute to Sophocles " a degree of subtlety passing into eccentricity would be of course ridiculous." I would rather say, "may perhaps be unjust."