Notes on Seneca Tragicus

Extract

Ajax is the subject of intonat, but little else is certain. Various punctuations are on offer, and even the authenticity of lines 545 and 546 is questioned; the difficulties are set out in Professor Tarrant's commentary (Cambridge, 1976). My concern is focused solely on 545 and the word nunc, printed in the text of the recent Oxford Classical Text and obelized by Professor Zwierlein. I suggest that the original word in this part of the line was saeuum, a standing epithet of the sea. Written seuum, its initial syllable might have disappeared through haplography; that would have left uum to be transformed into something else. E came up with a word close to the ductus, nunc; the A-tradition added se either to mend the metre or perhaps to indicate (by superscription?) the omitted syllable. If saeuum is a plausible emendation, we might at least keep 545 as a piece of direct speech introduced by intonat, exactly as at Phaed. 1065 magnum intonat.