Seneca, Agamemnon: manuscripts, text, interpretation

III.14 (a) Seneca, Agamemnon: manuscripts, text, interpretation.

III.14 (b) Ovid, Heroides 3, 5, 9, 16: manuscripts, text, interpretation.

NB University teaching is given in only one of these subjects each year. It is envisaged that candidates for Greats in 2008 will normally offer 10(a) Seneca rather than 10(b) Ovid. University teaching on 10(a) Seneca, Agamemnon will be available only in the year 2007/8; in 2006-7 the teaching will be on 10(b) Ovid, Heroides 3, 5, 9, 16.

These options are designed to give students concrete experience of Latin manuscripts, an understanding of the history of textual transmission, and an initiation into the fundamental and endlessly absorbing detailed study of Latin texts. The palaeographical part of the course will introduce students to the basics of Latin palaeography, with the opportunity to read manuscripts from the 5th century to the 15th, in capitals and minuscule (e.g. Caroline, Beneventan, gothic, humanistic).

Agamemnon. The earliest witness to the text of the Agamemnon is an inscription in Pompeii; the main witnesses are an 11th-century manuscript (E) and a group of 13th- and 15th-century manuscripts all going back to one lost 12th-century manuscript (A). The course will use images of Senecan MSS, and some original MSS in the Bodleian.

Seneca’s Agamemnon is a powerful and disconcerting mix of mental and physical tumult, narrative and philosophizing, intense monologue and impacted dialogue. The basic nature of the work is uncertain (was it staged? Is it dramatized philosophy?). It is a great text to study closely. The specifically textual problems are made particularly interesting by Seneca’s pithy and potent writing, the diverging readings and characteristics of E and A, and the ideas and work of critics in the 20th century and before. This is a good subject for anyone who wants to study Latin poetry in depth.

Recommended reading: L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (Oxford, 3rd edn. 1991).