Michael Hendry
25 February, 2000
Michael Hendry 25 February, 2000 |
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| Although some of the tragedies attributed to Seneca are available on the web in William L. Carey's Latin Library, I have prepared my own texts with select apparatus criticus. The title is 'Senecan Tragedy' rather than 'Tragedies of Seneca', since one play (Octavia) is certainly spurious, though some can be found to deny it, and another (Hercules Oetaeus) may well be. Both are recognizably of the 'School of Seneca', and cannot be omitted. | |
| Novelties of this edition (besides its virtual location) include: | |
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1. |
I have been more hospitable to conjectures than most editors: only slightly more so than Coffey and Mayer (Phaedra, 1990), quite a bit more than Zwierlein (OCT, 1987), and much more so than A. J. Boyle (Phaedra, 1987, and Troades, 1994). (A conservative age, particularly in the U.S.: paraphrase Colker on me and AJP on Butrica. This way, those reading Seneca on the web can be pushed into reading a more adventurous text than they might otherwise choose.) More conjectures, some of them my own, though not, I trust, enough to put this text in the same league as Richmond's Propertius or A. Y. Campbell's Propertius, or the editions of [?] Hofman [sp?] Peerlkamp. |
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2. |
The apparatus is select and simplified, and Zwierlein should be consulted for the details. I have no desire to make his Oxford Classical Text or his Kritischer Kommentar obsolete, nor could I if I tried. These notes do not aim at a full apparatus but include all deviations from Zwierlein, places where I am torn between two plausible readings, and the occasional conjecture of my own. (And any place the variants just looked interesting?) |
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3. |
Each play is in a single file. They take a
few seconds to download, but I hope this will be worth the wait. My index abandons the standard order, which has nothing except tradition to recommend it. [What is it? not even a MS order - if we look at all the MSS.] [Cf. Propertius' numeration: but renumbering has many negatives not involved in reordering plays with obvious names.] I order them in categories first by authenticity: Octavia last as certainly spurious (though some deny it) and Hercules Oetaeus second-to-last as dubious. (Most editors athetize, but R. G. M. Nisbet and a few others disagree. [Ref.]) The other eight -- actually seven and a half or seven and two quarters -- have been plausibly divided into three groups, with Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Phaedra written first, Medea, Troades, and Hercules Furens somewhat later, Thyestes and the unfinished Phoenissae last of all. [Cf. Fitch. Dates are purely relative, though group II is presumably partly or entirely later than 54, the terminus ante quem for Hercules Furens (imitated in the Apocolocyntosis) and Group III is probably -- not necessarily -- near the end. Of course, there are other things than death that could have interrupted work on the Phoenissae. [Talk about Hercules Oetaeus: a different kind of incompleteness? Would Seneca, like Ovid, have been more likely to pour out too much, and then have to trim and polish? No proof, but it seems plausible.] |
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4. |
For the manuscripts, I use the following
shorthand: 'E' and 'A' have their usual meanings [explain]. 'O' means the
consensus of the primary manuscripts for a particular play: E and family A.
Rework: 'a' (for 'codex') means one or more of the primary
manuscripts: a reading that has a fair chance of being ancient. 'c' means one
or more of the non-primary manuscripts. This means of course that more than one
variant may be labeled 'C', and more than one may be labeled 'c'. For details
on specific manuscripts, consult Zwierlein [Tarrant for Ag, who else?]
and the companion volume, Prolegomena to Claudian (BICS Supplement 45),
London, 1986. For further reading, an Italian team is preparing a bibliography of twentieth-century Seneca scholarship. It will be available on the web in March 2000, and in printed form a few months later. [Give contact number.] |
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