The Tragedies of Aeschylus

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Excerpt from The Tragedies of Aeschylus: Re-Edited With an English CommentaryBesides the want of a good running commentary, in the way of foot-notes, compiled uniformly for all the plays of Aeschylus, one cause of the distaste which many feel towards the careful study of this great poet is the exaggerated notion which they entertain of the uncertainty of the text. Unfortunately, Aes chylus has more often been made a field for critical ingenuity than for the exercise of sober judgment and sound poetical taste. This is evidenced in the thousands of improbable conjectures which have been hazarded by critics of the ao-called Porsonian school, who, mistaking mere shrewdness for scholarship, and ambitious only to surpass their predecessors in sagacity, have so handled the more obscure parts as scarcely to leave a line unquestioned or a phrase unassailed. Even where they have not ventured to alter, they have indulged in needless suspicions, and thus have tended to throw discredit upon the entire works on which they thought to shed a new light. N ow, although a very large number of conjectural corrections must of necessity find a place in every good edition of the poet, and indeed are now adopted by almost universal consent, as possessing either self-evident truth or a degree of probability closely approximating to absolute certainty, these bear no proportion to the attempts that have been made upon passages which may, with at least equal proba bility, be pronounced perfectly genuine, and may often be proved so by parallel examples from the author himself. On the other hand, there are those who cause scarcely less dissatisfaction to a reader of taste, by rejecting all, or nearly all, conjectural correc tion, and by as greatly overrating the authority of our present imperfect mss. As the others depreciated it. They seem to think no idiom too complex, no figure of speech too harsh, no violation of the ordinary grammatical rules too gross, no metrical deviations too violent to be accepted as from the pen of Aeschylus himself. They construe through thick and thin, and convert nonsense into sense with a facility absolutely startling to sober scholars. With such a Scylla and such a Charybdis to avoid.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.