Greek Textual Criticism

Euripides, Orestes 1-347, and 1246-1693: papyri, manuscripts, text.
(Honour School of Literae Humaniores, option III.13).

This paper uses both your eyes and your mind. You study a text in real detail, delving much deeper into primary questions of text and interpretation than other options allow. You also study how texts have been transmitted from Euripides’ time on, and learn how to read Greek papyri and Greek medieval manuscripts. The teaching will make use of Oxford’s outstanding collection of medieval manuscripts and its unrivalled collection of papyri. The practical and visual experience makes textual criticism much more tangible. Detailed work on the text gives you a much fuller grasp of metre, poetic language, and dramatic convention and form. The Orestes is Euripides’ most experimental and challenging reconfiguration of the basics of tragedy. New lyrical and musical forms, contemporary politics and mythological invention, disconcerting movements between pathos and near-burlesque, morality and amorality make this a rewarding play to study closely. It was particularly popular: so it is richly represented by papyri (one with music) and manuscripts; and there are numerous problems of interpolation. The papyrological and palaeographical part of the teaching is designed to help with work on the papyri and manuscripts of Orestes itself. Only a relatively modest stage need be reached. For papyri this is best tested in the exam by transcription from a (relatively easy) papyrus of Greek poetry. The classes on the text will discuss the problems in detail, and enable you to build up what is virtually your own commentary on the 800-odd lines of the play prescribed for special study. This subject is not abstruse but exciting; it will change your approach to reading classical literature. Advance reading: L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (3rd edn., Oxford 1991), esp. ch. 6; M. L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (Stuttgart 1973).