Seneca, Troades 1109–10

Abstract

The English critic Bentley first proposed emending the transmitted text of Troades 1109 from teget, the reading of all manuscripts, to leget. Bentley's suggestion subsequently gained wide acceptance and was printed in many later editions of the tragedies, including those of Leo (1878–9), Richter (1902), and Moricca (1917–23). More recent critics have favoured retention of the manuscript reading. Carlsson, for example, underlines the distinctive alliterative quality which the reading teget imparts to the line; and the latest commentator on the Troades has produced a spirited defence of the transmitted text:Andromache has not yet realized the condition of the corpse, and is thinking, not of gathering up fragmented limbs, but merely of the formal requirements of burial. What Carlsson (I p. 50) defends on grounds of alliteration should be retained on grounds of sense: teget tumuloque tradet is a doublet of which the second part makes clear the religious meaning of the first, more general, word.