no27 |
cultura classica |
Aeschylus: when to emend and when not to emend di Alex Garvie, University of Glasgow I have recently been reading with great interest the volume of the Proceedings of a Conference held in this University and at Rovereto in 1999 to mark the centenary of the birth of Mario Untersteiner. Some of the papers delivered at that Conference dealt sympathetically with Untersteiner's conservatism as a textual critic of Aeschylus, and I have a great deal of sympathy for that myself, as I have always considered myself to be at least moderately conservative when it comes to textual criticism. In his Repertory of conjectures on Aeschylus (p. 3) Roger Dawe estimated that between Wecklein's Appendix and the publication of his own book in 1965 some 20,000 conjectures had been published, of which only 0.1% might be thought `to have hit the truth'. Since 1965 emendation has continued unabated, and there is no good reason to suppose that the proportion of successful, or at least generally accepted, conjectures has grown any higher. We can all name critics who emended a text simply because they were clever enough to think of what seemed to them to be an improvement.
It is here, however, that my worries arise. Anyone who considers the numerous occasions in the Byzantine triad on which the Mediceus gives an inferior reading to other manuscripts will feel that in Supplices and Choephori, where it is the only manuscript, it is unlikely to be a reliable guide. But in the other plays too, where there is manuscript disagreement, there is no logical reason why any of them must have preserved the truth. They may all represent attempts to make sense of a deep-seated corruption. And even a consensus among the manuscripts does not necessarily mean that they preserve the truth. The whole tradition may still be corrupt. Of course our starting-point must be the manuscript tradition, but we sometimes, I think, forget that our primary duty as textual critics is not to make sense of it at all costs, but to determine what Aeschylus in fact wrote.
In my own Commentary on 78-81 I remarked that `some sort of sense can be extracted' from M's text, but went on to argue that that sense was unsatisfactory and the language excessively strained. Many of us, and I include myself, have found ourselves writing something like 'emendation here is unnecessary'. We should ask ourselves what we mean by this. If we are saying not only that the transmitted text makes sense, but also that it makes the best sense in its context and that of the play as a whole, that it is in accordance with everything that we know Aeschylus' style, and so is probably what Aeschylus wrote, then we are justified in saying it. If, however, we mean that because it is the transmitted text it is ipso facto preferable to a conjecture that makes better sense, we are on much shakier ground. The question that we should be asking is not `how can we save the manuscript reading, but how hard should we try?' Nor is it safe to assume that corruption is always clearly betrayed by a text that makes no, or inadequate, sense, or is simply written in bad Greek. Many, perhaps not all, copyists were perfectly capable of writing respectable Greek and could scan at least iambic trimeters. They wrote what, in most cases, seemed to them to make sense, but that does not necessarily mean that it was the sense which Aeschylus intended. For all we know, there may be lines in our texts which have never been suspected, but which are nevertheless corrupt. |