Page:The Plays of Euripides Vol. 1- Edward P. Coleridge (1910).djvu/17

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PREFACE.
xi

discuss the genuineness of any of the plays attributed to the poet. Where single lines have been called in question by Paley or Nauck, by Dindorf or Kirchhoff, I have generally noticed their objections, without, however, absolutely omitting the lines. But when the genuineness of large portions of plays is at stake, as in the case of the conclusion of the "Phœnissæ," or of frequent passages in the "Iphigenia in Aulide," to say nothing of the entire "Rhesus," I have not made any allusion to the voluminous controversies that have been carried on over them.


In alluding briefly to editions of Euripides, other than that of Paley, I cannot sufficiently express my debt to the critical apparatus prefixed to Vol. I. of the Teubner edition ("Euripidis Tragœdiæ ex recensione Augusti Nauckii. Editio tertia. Lipsiæ, 1887"), which I have consulted throughout; as well as to the critical notes appended to Hartung's edition, an edition one might employ with still greater advantage, were it not so full of his own daring and not unfrequently capricious corrections; to Jerram's useful little volumes in the Clarendon Press series, the value of which is immensely enhanced by the addition of brief critical notes on the most important variant readings; and lastly, to several editions of separate plays, amongst which for English scholars, Sandys' edition of the "Bacchæ" ranks facile princeps as a book which every student of Euripides will value and appreciate; to the careful but somewhat laboured works of Pflugk and Klotz, a few only of whose volumes I have read through; and lastly, to Verrall's edition of the "Medea," and Mahaffy's edition of the "Hippolytus," both of which works are full of interesting suggestions, although, like Hartung's, they seem to admit too many variations into the text. What Paley has called the "subjectivity" of the editor is almost too conspicuous; so that, what with rewriting in the one case and re-arranging in the