A commentary on the final scene of Euripides’ Phoenician women

Abstract

Often enough the scholar who deals with ancient Greek poetry, specifically drama, has to answer a difficult question: whether the plays that have reached us today are in the same form as when they were written by their creator. Dramas today suffer from interpolations and corruptions and scholars have to dedicate a lot of effort to remove them. Luckily they have plenty of "tools" they can use: syntax, grammar, metre, style, vocabulary, relevance. One, of course, must always bear in mind that all the above are not always adequate criteria. Repeated phraseology, faulty grammar, undesirable metre can, but do not always indicate whether a passage is an interpolation or not. Strange vocabulary is not enough either, since common words may survive in a limited number of plays by accident. Relevance with a passage's environment can be a very subjective criterion as well. This thesis is concerned with one of the most problematic, in terms of interpolation, tragedies, the "Phoenician Women" of Euripides. After a general introduction about what the tragedy is about and what the main problems in it are, chapter two deals with the final part of it (lines 1307-1767) and the textual problems it presents and at the end the final chapter tries to give us an answer to the most prominent inconsistency of the play, i.e. what does Antigone do at the end of the play: does she follow Oedipous or does she bury Polyneikes?