Euripides: Selected Fragments, Vol. 1 (Telephus, Cretans, Stheneboea, Bellerophon, Cresphontes, Erechtheus, Phaethon, Wise Melanippe, Captive Melanippe)

288 Pages·1995·7.829 MB·English

by  Euripides, C. Collard, A. D. Lee

THE PLAYS OF EURIPIDES
SELECTED FRAGMENTARY PLAYS: I
General Editor
Professor Christopher Collard

EURIPIDES
Selected Fragmentary Plays
with Introductions, Translations and Commentaries by
C. Collard, M. J. Cropp and K. H. Lee
Volume I
Telephus, Cretans, Stheneboea, Bellerophon, Cresphontes,
Erectheus, Phaethon, Wise Melanippe, Captive Melanippe
Aris & Phillips Ltd. — Warminster — England
© C. Collard, M.J. Cropp and ΚΗ. Lee 1995. All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any
manner or in any form without the prior permission of the Publishers in writing.
ISBNs
0856686182 cloth
0856686190 limp
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Printed and published in England by Aris & Phillips Ltd, Teddington
House, Warminster, Wiltshire, BA12 8PQ
CONTENTS OF VOLUME ONE
General Editor's Foreword vi
Preface vii
General Introduction
I. Evidence for the fragmentary plays 1
Il. Modern study of the fragmentary plays 4
III. Form and content of this edition 1
Bibliography and Abbreviations 13
Telephus — (438B.C) MJ.C. 17
Cretans (near 438?) = C.C. 53
Stheneboea (before 4297) C.C. 79
Bellerophon (about 430) C.C. 98
Cresphontes (about 425) M.J.C. 121
Erectheus (4227) M.J.C. 148
Phaethon (about 420) C.C. 195
Melanippe Sophe, "Wise Melanippe ' (late 420s?) and
Melanippe Desmotis, 'Captive Melanippe' (before 412) M.J.C. 240
GENERAL EDITOR'S FOREWORD
In the earlier volumes of this Series I have begun my Foreword with the
argument that Euripides' remarkable variety of subjects, ideas and methods
challenges each generation of readers, and audiences, to a fresh appraisal. The
complete plays, eighteen in number, are challenge enough; but there are about as
many fragmentary plays which it is possible to reconstruct in outline and which
increase and diversify the challenge still more. The Preface and General Intro-
duction to this volume assert the great interest of these plays in their own right,
and describe the ways in which they illuminate the complete plays while
depending on them for their own illumination.
This volume, and a second which will complete the selection, appear to be
the first of their kind for Euripides. While they are in the general style of the
Aris and Phillips' Classical Texts, the fragmentary material on which they draw
has sometimes to be presented and discussed on a fuller scale, and is offered to a
rather wider readership. Not just school, college or university students and their
teachers but also professional scholars will, we hope, be served by these
volumes. For each play there is an editor's introduction which attempts recon-
struction and appreciation, discussing context, plot, poetic resources and
meaning. The Greek text is faced by an English prose translation — for many of
the plays the first complete such translation to be published. The commentaries
privilege interpretation and appreciation as far as possible over philological
discussion; but the needs of fragmentary texts make the latter inseparable from
the former.
The content and nature of this volume and its companion explain the
omission of the General Introduction to the Series and of the General Biblio-
graphy which are found in other volumes. Instead, a General Introduction to the
fragmentary tragedies is offered, including a section which reviews the special
features and problems of these plays; and there is a Bibliography of works
especially important to them.
University of Wales, Swansea Christopher Collard
vi
PREFACE
This edition is directed at the need which has long been apparent to make some
at least of Euripides' fragmentary plays more easily accessible in English to
specialists and non-specialists alike. We hope too that it will encourage attention
to some fascinating texts which are often of considerable importance to the
critical appreciation of the poet. English readers have for long been frustrated for
access to the majority of the fragmentary plays unless they command not only
Greek but also either Latin or some of the modern languages.! Many of the
fragments, and discussions of them, are in widely scattered publications; in our
edition we try to bring together much of this work, especially of the 20th
Century, for the benefit of readers of English, including those who have no
Greek at all.
Our selection is of the most important and interesting plays, defined as
those for which there is sufficient primary text and secondary evidence to permit
at least an outline reconstruction and location of the fragments. Some readers
will inevitably be disappointed that we have not included more plays; but a wider
selection would have reduced the room for introduction and commentary to a
scarcely useful minimum. Inevitably, too, some very fragmentary and uncertain-
ly read texts have demanded more technical discussion than is usual for this
Series.
Our discussions of most of the papyrus fragments, including all of those in
Volume I, are based on previously published (or in one case about-to-be-
published) editions of the papyri.
The second volume will include Alexandros, Palamedes and Sisyphus (the
three plays which accompanied Trojan Women in the production of 415 B.C.),
Andromeda, Antiope, Archelaus, Hypsipyle, Oedipus and Philoctetes. The
fragments of Euripides’ first Hippolytus will be found with Michael Halleran's

| We record here some noteworthy publications in English. G. Murray, Euripides
(transl. of Hippolytus, etc.: London, 19159), 313-52 (‘Appendix on Lost Plays’) and
W.N. Bates, Euripides: A Student of Human Nature (Philadelphia, 1930), 202-303
(ch. 5, "The Lost Plays') give summary accounts of many plays (Bates gives 57);
Page, GLP has an edition with brief introduction and translation of a few longer
papyrus texts. There are excellent editions and commentaries, but without trans-
lations, in Euripides’ Kresphontes and Archelaus by A. Harder (Leiden, 1985),
Euripides: Hypsipyle by G.W. Bond (Oxford, 1963), Euripides: Phaethon by
J. Diggle (Cambridge, 1970), and E.W. Handley and J. Rea, The Telephus of
Euripides (London, 1957). T.B.L. Webster performed a great service to the fragment-
ary plays when he emphasized them in The Tragedies of Euripides (London, 1967).
vii
viii
edition of the complete play in this Series. An /ndex to both volumes will be
printed at the end of the second.
That we have been able to undertake this selective edition at a manageable
price is due to the interest and support of our publishers Aris and Phillips; we
are confident that our readers will share our gratitude to them.
In preparing our volumes, each of us took the first and also final
responsibility for individual plays; our initials are put against them on the
contents-page. All three of us have however read and annotated one another's
successive drafts. It has been a great benefit and pleasure for us to hold
discussions face to face, if usually in pairs, in all three of our home countries.
For helping to make such collaboration possible we owe further gratitude to Aris
and Phillips in Britain and to the research funds of our respective universities.
We have been helped too by the initial encouragement and subsequently the
comments of friends and colleagues. We particularly thank Michael Dewar, Pat
Easterling, Robert Fowler, Eric Handley, Michael Halleran, Richard Hamilton,
Richard Kannicht, Ludwig Koenen, Jim Neville, Stefan Radt, and Richard
Seaford. Our greatest debt is to James Diggle, who has read almost the whole
volume in draft and provided detailed comments and suggestions; we indicate
some of these with his initials ‘JD'.
Preparation of drafts and final copy was undertaken by Martin Cropp with
the assistance of Lillian Kogawa in Calgary. Christopher Collard and Kevin Lee
record their warmest thanks to both.
March 1995
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
I, Some Categories of Evidence for the Fragmentary Plays
(i) Euripides’ own words, the primary evidence, survive in (1) papyrus or
parchment fragments of single plays or of collected 'editions' of the plays, which
range in date from the 3rd Century B.C. (Erectheus, for example) to the 5th or
early 6th Century A.D. (Phaethon, for example); with these belong texts which
were never complete but have survived as excerpts in now fragmentary
anthologies (Pasiphae's speech in Cretans, for example, or the rebuttal of
misogyny in Captive Melanippe); and in (2) the 'book-fragments' — excerpts or
quotations or references made by other ancient authors, anthologists, lexico-
graphers and so on, almost all of them with their own manuscript traditions like
that of Euripides' surviving and complete plays. The earliest such quotations are
by the comic dramatist Aristophanes, Euripides' own contemporary; the latest are
by Byzantine scholars, their sources often no longer identifiable. Some of the
texts of the ancient writers who excerpt or annotate Euripides are themselves
fragmentary, either because they are themselves excerpted in other writers or
because their texts are carried in fragmentary manuscripts; in such cases we are
even further from Euripides' own words.
For both (1) and (2) many of the texts or quotations come with incomplete
details of authorship and ascription (or with none at all); some are attributed just
to 'Euripides', some just to a play, no dramatist being named. In such cases
attribution to poet and particular play is a question of scholarly judgement after
consideration of such internal evidence or external pointers as can be found.
There are inevitably many texts of disputed attribution: large papyrus fragments
like those of a Theseus (P. Oxy. 2452: both Sophocles and Euripides are
possible), quotations of a few lines or words, even single words. In our edition
we cite the authority for attribution, ancient or modern, and review the disputable
fragments as dispassionately as we can.
(ii) For Euripides the secondary evidence — official records, scholarly inform-
ation, description, allusion, anecdote and the like — is much more extensive
than for the other tragedians, and in one respect above all. Because his plays
enjoyed greater popularity after his death than during his life — both in the
theatre and on the page — there survive numerous 'hypotheses', of two kinds.
The first are summary introductions to the plays, including information drawn
from performance-records, chiefly Athenian (didascaliae: TrGF I pp. 3-52); these
go back to Aristophanes of Byzantium's edition of Tragedy about 200 B.C.;
2 GENERAL INTRODUCTION
some of them were utilised and expanded by later scholars, both ancient and
Byzantine. The second kind are narrative plot-summaries of disputed origin
which were copied, modified or imitated from antiquity into the Byzantine
period. The more complete of the hypotheses, of both kinds, are attached to the
surviving plays in the main manuscript tradition; but for many of both the
surviving and the fragmentary plays there are narrative summaries preserved
either complete or in part both on papyrus and. copied in later authors. Where
they are complete or largely intact, they can aid reconstruction very considerably
(as in Alexandros, Wise Melanippe, Stheneboea), where they are fragmentary
they are at best suggestive (e.g. Oedipus, Phaethon), at worst of no benefit
(e.g. Bellerophon, Telephus).!
(iii) Some of the book-fragments are embedded in references to their plays which
fill out the content or nature of both play and fragment, and allow the fragment
to be located in the plot or assigned to an individual character. Such information
is invaluable to reconstruction, but the caution necessary in using the less
informative citations is not always heeded: scraps of information, and inferences
from small hints, can seldom be brought convincingly together into large
signposts. Many book-fragments come without any information whatever
concerning context, and even the primary meaning of the Greek may therefore be
in doubt, particularly when they are moral generalisations. An extreme example
of all these uncertainties is Bellerophon, for which there are over thirty book-
fragments but no sure path to their overall arrangement; a fragmentary
hypothesis has not helped at all. Speculative reconstruction of such plays is
wholly justifiable, indeed an almost irresistible challenge, and each attempt
either narrows the possibilities or adds new ones; speculation however it must
remain. Even the acquisition in this century of large new fragments can leave a
play still no more than a broken outline, like Cretans; yet our hold on others has
occasionally been enormously strengthened if not secured through gradual

! Hypotheses: for the 'Aristophanic' kind see the bibl. in Euripides: Hecuba, ed.
C. Collard (Warminster, 1991), 129, now to be supplemented from Ὁ... Mastro-
narde, Euripides: Phoenissae (Cambridge, 1994), 168 n. 2. Scholars are in general
agreed that the narrative kind stem ultimately from a Euripidean collection composed
in the Ist or 2nd Century A.D. but ascribed in order to acquire respectability to
Aristotle's 4th Century B.C. pupil Dicaearchus: J. Rusten, GRBS 23 (1982), 357-67;
ΒΕ. Kassel in ZXOAIA: Studies...Holwerda (Groningen, 1985), 53-9; W. Luppe in
Aristoteles: Werk und Wirkung (Berlin, 1985), 610-2 — all three against
M.W. Haslam, GRBS 16 (1975), 152-5. Considerable fragments of the Euripidean
collection survive in papyri: see Austin (below, n. 3); W. Luppe, Acta Antiqua 33
(1992), 39-44 (on the ‘hypotheses').