On the Transmission of the Bacchae

Extract

In the last number of CQ,(N.S. xvi [1966], 28 [iii]), I mistakenly attributed to Professor Zuntz (An Inquiry into the Transmission of the Plays of Euripides [Cambridge, 1965]) the view that P's exemplar was, before correction, the ‘parent’ of L.

The possibility that the parent (‘Λ’ in Zuntz) of L became, after corrections derived from its own parent (‘β’), the parent of P is in fact considered by Zuntz (p. 124) only as an alternative to the hypothesis, propounded by him on p. 122 and set out in his stemma on p. 192, that the parent (‘π’) of P was a copy of Λ and thus a brother of L. Regrettably, An Inquiry appeared too late for me to do it justice, with my article already in proof. In addition, I now draw attention to the following passages in An Inquiry as containing arguments which affect what I have written: pp. 13 ff. (my p. 28, n. 1), 119 f. (on Ba. 144–7), and 118 (on Ba. 151).