Week 5: Antigone Lecture #2, Thoughts on Manuscript Preservation

     I think we often think ancient plays are perfectly preserved, 100% accurate prints of the original product. It is easy to forget that there was no database or even text at the time, as manuscripts were the only form of written text. An entire play would need to be rewritten by hand for another copy, a highly laborious process that leaves room for human error. One thing the lecture covers are the papyrus scraps found in Oxyrhynchus, 500 years after it was first performed. The gap between those two forms of the play was baffling to me, as Antigone may very well have not been found in a slightly different circumstance. I was also surprised to learn that nobody knows who actually reproduced the play. It is truly fascinating that transmission history is its own subject, noting the crossover between book and print history with text history. Among the problems of manuscript texts are how easy it is for it to change or to lose words. For example, the lecture mentions that a line reading “O dearest Haemon, how your father dishonors you!” (Sophocles) may have been changed to be Antigone’s line, when it was supposed to be Ismene’s. It makes you wonder if anything else has changed that we don’t know about, a sentiment that goes out to all ancient texts. It is even possible that the original version of some texts are fundamentally different from their modern counterparts.