Improving Euripides

 The idea that anyone would tamper with Euripides’ poetry is just too much for me. I can’t comprehend it and probably shouldn’t even bring it up.

Euripides’ contemporaries didn’t revere him nearly as much as I do. The judges of the drama competitions often thought his plays were second-rate. They thought that other poets, unknown today, produced better plays.

When Euripides’ plays were revived in the 4^th century BCE, the producers added scenes and cut others. 

As Elizabeth Wyckoff, translator of The Phoenician Women, said, “it is obvious that a play handled so freely in the gross would probably be tinkered with in detail.”

In the case of most of the ancient Greek writers, we don’t really know what we’re missing. Few manuscripts survived. In some cases, what we know of an important work rests on a single manuscript.

The exception is the New Testament, where we have thousands of manuscripts, ranging from complete texts to fragments. The variations within those manuscripts should be interesting to those who think that the text is infallible. I always wonder which one they’re talking about.

• Source: The Phoenician Women, translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, is in Euripides V in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 67-140. The quotation is from her introduction on p. 69.