BMCR 2009.08.03: Kovacs on Finglass, Sophocles: Electra. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 44

P. J. Finglass (ed.), Sophocles: Electra. Cambridge Classical Texts and
Commentaries 44.  Cambridge/New York:  Cambridge University Press,
2007.  Pp. xi, 646.  ISBN 9780521868099.  $160.00.

Reviewed by David Kovacs, University of Virginia ([email protected])
Word count:  1990 words
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[The reviewer apologizes for the lateness of this review, for which he
alone is responsible.]

This is a superlative commentary whose learning and acuity would do
credit to a much older scholar (the preface is dated March 2005, less
than four years after F[inglass] took his B.A. at Oxford). It is based
on a D.Phil. dissertation on lines 251-870, which he wrote during his
time as a fellow by examination at All Souls College. It is also an
astonishing feat to write such a full and thoughtful commentary in such
a short time: commentaries on a similar scale, such as Barrett's
Hippolytos or Mastronarde's Phoenissae, seem to have occupied their
authors for a much longer time. In the same year 2007 he published in
the same series a commentary on Pythian Eleven.

The introduction has the following sections: (1) Date (Finglass argues
that the much discussed question of whether Sophocles' or Euripides'
play came first is less important than it has seemed to some); (2) The
story before Sophocles (on Sophocles' debt to Aeschylus, Homer, and
Stesichorus); (3) Good spirits? (discusses the split between the
"optimists," who view the matricide as just and morally uncomplicated,
and the "pessimists," who think Sophocles meant his audience to be
troubled; Finglass claims to take neither view but to read the evidence
in each scene on its own terms); (4) Leaving out the polis? (Sophocles
doesn't quite do this but steers a middle course); (5) Production (on
the staging, particularly the use of the two eisodoi); (6) The text (a
useful if brief discussion, which also justifies Finglass's policy of
ignoring transmitted colometry and adopting the orthography of
contemporary inscriptions advocated in West's Teubner Aeschylus); and
(7) Reception (a brief listing of six recent treatments of the
question). The text and critical apparatus that follow are Finglass's
own. The commentary, at 461 pages of fine print, is a thorough
treatment of the time-honored questions of text, staging,
interpretation, and parallel expressions in earlier and later
literature. There follow Appendix 1, containing the location of
conjectures mentioned in the app. crit. but not in the commentary, and
Appendix 2, unpublished remarks by Fraenkel, now in the archive of
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on the play's messenger speech,
together with an English translation by Finglass and an assessment of
Fraenkel's argument. These are followed by a full bibliography of
standard reference works, standard works on Sophocles, editions of his
Electra, editions, commentaries and translations of other works, and
works cited by author's name with date, the last running to 51 pages
and containing more than 1200 items. There is a full index of subjects
and a full index of Greek followed by a jejune index locorum (readers
interested in the light Finglass sheds on authors from Homer to Dante
and beyond will simply have to page through the commentary).

Finglass has abilities of a high order in textual criticism and
metrics. To these is joined an enviable familiarity with the secondary
literature on tragedy (someone who wants to know what resources are
available for explicating tragedy in the first decade of the
twenty-first century could begin by reading Finglass) as well as on a
large number of other authors and topics. I treat these in order.

Sophocles' text (even in the plays of the triad) is one the ages have
corrupted by accidental alteration and omission and by deliberate
interpolation. He is also an author who stretches the resources of the
Greek language to pretty near their limit. So the editor is frequently
confronted with a choice: is the oddity of expression here the result
of corruption needing to be corrected, or is it the work of the poet
and deserving of defense? Finglass to my mind does the work both of a
skeptical critic and a conservative critic (both of which are needed in
editing Sophocles) to a superlative degree. Here are some departures
from the OCT that show good skepticism. 1 del. Haslam (on strong
external evidence); 86 <greek>KAU)GH=S</greek> Hussey et Russell; 145
<greek>W(=N</greek> Stinton, which Finglass also finds in L ante corr.,
restoring meter; 312 <greek>KAI\</greek> Meineke, restoring idiom;
<greek>TOU/S ME XRH\</greek> Tournier; 683 <greek>O)RQI/W|
KHRU/GMATI</greek> Earle; 845 <greek>D'OU)=N</greek> West; 853
<greek>I)DOME/NA QROEI=S</greek> Diggle, removing dubious prosody and
restoring Greek idiom; 1128 <greek>U(F' W(=NPER</greek> Wecklein; 1434
<greek>PA/LIN . . . TA\ PRI/N</greek> Musgrave. (Finglass's own
conjectures are limited, with the exception of the deletion of
<greek>D'</greek> in 1296, to orthography and supplementation.) Where
the OCT has adopted conjectures, Finglass often makes a strong case for
the soundness of the paradosis, as at 610 and 918 (less convincingly at
123 and 186) or (more frequently) he obelizes passages where he finds
proposed solutions not wholly convincing, as at 278, 345, and 1086-87
(perhaps unnecessarily at 139 where he makes a strong case for
<greek>OU)/T' EU)XAI=S</greek>).

Finglass is a good metrician, and his justifications for the analyses
he adopts are always well argued. In a few places, e.g. 823-4=837-8,
the colometry of his text does not marry up exactly with his schema.

The breadth of Finglass's reading is impressive. Time after time he
cites the perfectly apt discussion of a point at issue, some of them
new to me. Only three times was I surprised by omissions: at 492 the
designation of a <greek>GA/MOS</greek> as <greek>A)/LEKTROS</greek> and
<greek>A)/NUMFOS</greek> is illuminated by D. Fehling, Hermes 96 (1968)
142-55; at 272 he could have cited F. Zucker's treatment of <greek>
AU)QE/NTHS </greek>, SBLeipzig, Philol.-hist. Kl. 107 (1962), Heft 4;
and at 516 the discussion of unannounced entries might have cited M.
Halleran, Stagecraft in Euripides.

Readers will no doubt test Finglass's literary judgments against their
own experience of the play. In view of the wide divergence of
interpretation on the question of Sophocles' attitude toward the
matricide, it was scarcely to be hoped that Finglass would carry all
before him. He sets out not to be either a doctrinaire "optimist" or
"pessimist," and through most of the commentary he judges each scene
and speech on its own merits. Thus, on the one hand he quashes,
successfully in my opinion, a number of views of the early parts of the
play that would make the whole idea of divinely ordered matricide, and
the trickery that that entails, seem dubious to begin with. On the
other hand he gives a lot of space to Electra's admission (regarding
Clytaemestra's claim of justice) that the same act can be just and
shameful, which of course applies to the killing of Clytaemestra as
well. But at the end of the play Finglass seems to turn "pessimist"
with a vengeance. On 1398-1441 he claims that the tone of 1406 and
1410, especially the use of feigned ignorance in the
<greek>TIS</greek>, alienates "our" sympathy. He admits that claims of
justice continue to be made but says that Electra's vengeful attitude
indicates that her character has suffered. The principle behind these
and other remarks seems to be that unless tyrannicides are clearly seen
to act from a sense of disinterested justice, they forfeit the
audience's sympathy. Yet the Athenian lawcourt, where the prosecutor
for murder was a relative of the victim and wore his desire for revenge
on his sleeve for all to see, suggests that Sophocles' audience would
have had different expectations. A further question raised by the end
of the play is the meaning of Aegisthus' reference in 1497-98 to the
present and future woes of the Pelopids. Finglass says that the final
exit into the skene rules out later pursuit by the Erinyes and prefers
to give Aegisthus' words no definite reference. But Oedipus' exit into
the palace, pace Taplin,[[1]] does not rule out his later exile or make
Teiresias' prediction of it a dead letter. My own instinct is that his
words do hint (unwittingly) at the Erinyes and that this is Sophocles'
way of saying "but that's another story."[[2]] There is thus a slight
darkening of the mood at the end (slight because, ghastly as the
Erinyes are, Orestes finally escapes them) but nothing to indicate that
the two principals are morally tainted or that their successful killing
of the usurpers is a wholly futile act, which would be hard to
reconcile with the kind of interest Sophocles has encouraged us to take
in Electra and Orestes in the rest of the play.

It is a reviewer's job to point out errors and omissions. The haul,
including the reservations expressed in the last paragraph, is slight.
236-50 is a difficult passage where Finglass gives less help than he
might and makes some choices that in my judgment make the passage
harder. Finglass is right that in 236 <greek>KAKO/TATOS</greek> is not
"misery." But instead of "wickedness" (sc. of Agamemnon's killers)
"disloyalty" (sc. of Electra) would give better parallelism with the
other questions. Given that it has several meanings in tragedy he might
have indicated that <greek>I)/SXOUSA</greek> here means "restraining."
Finglass says nothing about the logic of the <greek>GA\R</greek> in 245
(the connection between Electra's lament and the punishment of
Agamemnon's murderers is explained by Jebb). For the sentiment that if
this particular murder is not punished, justice in general is gone, he
could have cited Eur. Hec. 799-805 (reading <greek>A)NQRW/POIS
I)/SON</greek> with the mss.). Lastly, both <greek>E)/RROI</greek> and
<greek>A(PA/NTWN</greek> and the general argument seem to me to make
against uppercase Aidos and Eusebeia. On the other hand, like Dawe and
unlike the OCT he prints Martin's necessary <greek>TA)\N</greek> at
249.

At 855 Finglass remarks on <greek>I(/N'</greek> "the word must here
denote not the place to which, but from which, Electra does not want to
be led," but he offers no parallels, nor do LSJ or Ellendt. Jebb
translates "in a case where," but preceded by a compound of
<greek>A)/GW</greek> we might expect it to mean "to where" (thus
Lloyd-Jones), which is difficult sense in view of 834-36. Perhaps the
text is corrupt.

In the use of the two eisodoi Finglass has made things more difficult
for himself than necessary by putting Agamemnon's tomb at the end of
Eisodos B and using Eisodos A for all other entrances and exits (p.
12). This means that Orestes' and Pylades' first entrance is by Eisodos
A and their exit, toward Agamemnon's tomb, by Eisodos B. This creates a
difficulty he notes on 55: "It is not clear how the urn can already
have been hidden near the tomb, since Orestes and the Paedagogus are
only now setting off in that direction. The audience will not have
lingered over the point, but it remains an inconcinnity." But to judge
from Arist. Poetics 1455a25-28, at least in the fourth century a play
could be hissed from the stage for having a character enter from the
wrong direction. A simpler and quite common division is between the
foreign and the local eisodos. A tomb, always outside the city, is
naturally situated down the foreign eisodos, as at Alc. 835-36. The
only drawback to this scheme is that the foreign eisodos will be used
for the entrances of the Paedagogus, Chrysothemis from the tomb,
Orestes with the urn, and (probably) Aegisthus, and the local eisodos
will be little used: only by the Chorus for its first entrance and
final exit. But this is not a play where momentous developments are to
be expected from Mycenae as well as from abroad.

The book is mercifully free of misprints. In the text read
<greek>TIQH=|S</greek> at 581 (same error in the commentary ad loc.).
In the app. crit. at 492 the reading of RZg and the conjecture of
Blaydes should probably be <greek>E)PE/BAN</greek>. On p. 126, line 4
fb the two Greek words appear to be interchanged. On p. 127, lines
16-17 read "of being eaten last." On p. 169, line 8 fb read
<greek>E)P'</greek> as the last word. In the note on 308, line 5 read
"between preposition and substantive." On p. 242 the comment on
<greek>GE/NUS</greek> belongs further down. On 812 the lemma should
read <greek>POI= ME XRH\ MOLEI=N</greek>.


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Notes:


1.   O. Taplin, "Sophocles in his Theatre," in B. M. W. Knox et al.,
edd., Sophocle, Entretiens Hardt 29 (Vandoeuvres-Geneva, 1983), pp.
172-74, argues that Oedipus instead of exile receives the harsher
penalty of perpetual incarceration. But not only does this falsify
Teiresias' prophecy but also, as pointed out by J. March, The Creative
Poet: Studies on the treatment of myths in Greek poetry, BICS
Supplement 49 (1987) 148, the idea that incarceration is worse than
exile is never made in the text and is too subtle to be left unsaid.

2.   This is the view well argued for by D. Roberts, "Sophoclean
Endings: Another Story," Arethusa 21 (1988) 178-9.