Verrall on Euripides' "Suppliants" 939ff Ackerman, Robert Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Spring 1973; 14, 1; ProQuest pg. 103 Verrall on Euripides' Suppliants 939ff Robert Ackerman THE following unpublished letter, from the Gilbert Murray papers in the Bodleian Library,! offers an excellent example of the insight into theater and the speculative vigor of A. W. Verrall (1851-1912), the incomparable "Splendid Emendax."2 It was written 5 January 1904 from an Algerian health establishment where Verrall, seriously incapacitated by arthritis and other ailments, had gone with Mrs Verrall to escape the rigors of a Cambridge winter. He had already been friendly with Murray for some years, their friendship founded on and deepened by their continuing interest in Euripides. Of the two letters from Verrall in the Murray papers, the other concerns arrangements for one of Murray's visits to Cambridge, where he frequently was a house guest of the Verralls. Reasonably enough, the two men preferred when possible to discuss scholarly questions in person rather than through the mails. This letter, then, is exceptional, brought into being by Verrall's need to go abroad while Murray was reading proofs of his edition of Euripides for the Oxford Classical Texts series. Apparently Verrall saw duplicate proofs throughout the OCT project, for along with Wilamowitz3 he is thanked first in the Preface for his "constanti benevolentia opem consiliumque." We may infer from the second sentence of the letter that Verrall generally made most of his notes directly on the proof sheets themselves, and only wrote the extended sort of comment we have here when a major point was in question. If he wrote any other long notes such as this one they seem not to have survived. With this sample of Verrallian marginalia-if that is not too deprecatory a word to describe what in 1 Some of the research for this essay was carried out thanks to a grant from the Columbia University Council on Research in the Humanities; I also wish to thank Dr Alexander Murray, Dr A. S. F. Cow, Professor W. M. Calder III, the Department of Western Manu­ scripts of the Bodleian Library, and Mrs. Imogen Mollet for permission to publish. I See the memoir by M. A. Bayfield (with contributions by F. M. Cornford and other hands) in Verrall's posthumous Literary Essays Classical and Modern (Cambridge 1913); for "Splendid Emendax" see p.m. S See Murray's "Memories of Wilamowitz," AuA 4 (1954) 9-15. 103 104 VERRALL ON EURIPIDES' SUPPLIANTS 939ff fact is a brief critical essay-before us, one can only echo (but prob­ ably for different reasons) Verrall's student Gilbert Norwood when he says that "We must regret that Verrall published no essay on [Suppliants]."" Despite the fact that Murray and Verrall were the closest of friends, and were moreover engaged in the same task of establishing and explicating the text of Euripides, they moved in different scholarly worlds so far as their methods and approaches were concerned. The archetypal rationalist textual critic, Verrall was perfectly prepared to read Euripides as if the latter were a late Victorian anticlerical rationalist like himself, and he was both willing and able to recon­ struct and reinterpret the text so as clearly to show Euripides at work subverting the gods.5 Jane Ellen Harrison, close friend to both Murray and Verrall, in a partially published letter of 4 May 1907 to the former, has left us a fine example of Verrall's famous wit at work: You know don't you that AWV has discovered that the earthquake and fire in the Bacchae are all Hallucinations-I did not realise how he hated the Bacchus whom I love so. He declares he sympathises with Pentheus. "Any gentleman would be justly annoyed if he found a wild bull in his stables," he said. We got quite stormy over it.6 Indeed, as Murray and Miss Harrison (along with F. M. Cornford and A. B. Cook) pursued their vitalist and ritualist investigations into Greek social and dramatic origines, although friendship remained intact, the gap grew ever wider between them and Verrall. However much Verrall lacked sympathy with their anthropological and archaeological approach (which he called "stuffage"7)-and the lack 4 Gilbert Norwood, "The Supplices," in Essays on Euripidean Drama (Berkeley 1954) 112 n.l. Norwood himself, who strongly resembled his teacher in tone and technique, has nothing particular to say of 939ff in his own essay, in which he out-Verralls Verrall in radically reworking the text. 5 See Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley 1971) 206 n.69: "Its [G. Murray, Euripides and His Age] worst features were due to the influence of A. w. Verrall, a scholar whose fertility in ingenious speculation was fatally combined with an utter inability to sympathise with the mental attitudes of the past. Regrettably, this influence is not yet quite extinct, partly owing to the work of Verrall's diSciple, G. Norwood." 8 The first part of the letter, in slightly different form, appears in J. G. Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters (London 1959) 57. The original is on deposit in the Newn­ ham College Library, where I consulted it, and is printed with the kind permission of Miss M. E. Lane. 1 Stewart, op.cit. (supra n.6) 56-57. ROBERT ACKERMAN 105 of sympathy was near total-he had, besides his brilliance and daring in establishing and interpreting a text, a lively idea of the conditions of dramatic poetry. No English scholar before Verrall, and no earlier scholar at all save Otfried MUller ... was possessed of a similar capacity of visualizing a Greek tragedy as a play to be performed on the stage. Consequently one vital aspect of this poetry was more adequately brought out in Verrall's com­ mentaries than in those of his forerunners.8 In the letter below we certainly see Verrall's theatrical sense at work, for his entire textual argument concerning the retention of the manuscript reading aUToc in 939 derives from his having envisaged the action on the stage. What is perhaps more noteworthy, because less expected in the light of his determined 'antiprimitivism', is his con­ vincing and assured use of ethnographic evidence in his citation of The Golden Bough and the anthropological cast of his argument in general. On the basis of this one letter it would be premature indeed to call Verrall a convert to the anthropological point of view, but to a reader of the rather Voltaire an Euripides the Rationalist (1895) the tone of the letter comes as a distinct surprise. Beyond this, one notices that the entire comment is in fact an ex­ tended argument for the reading aUToe in 939, which has the support of both manuscripts Land P. J. J. Reiske (1716-74), however, had emended to OVTOC,9 and Murray finally adopted this reading.10 It seems, however, not without something of a struggle, for Murray's a ppara tus gives: "OVTOC Reiske; aUToc L P (reere: C nemine iubente', Verrall)." This is the only time Verrall's name occurs in Murray's apparatus to Suppliants. This letter tells us the reason why. The punctuation and paragraphs of the original have been preserved. My dear Murray,- Jan. 5. 1904 Etablissement Thermal, Hammam R'Hiva, Algeriell Yours enclosing corrections of first proof duly received. I hope you 8 Eduard Fraenkel, Aeschylus' Agamemnon I (Oxford 1950) 57. 8 I presume in Animadversiones in Euripidem et Aristophanem (Leipzig 1753), which I have not seen. 10 Wilamowitz apparently had convinced him: see Analecta Euripidea (Berlin 1875) 118 and Griechische Tragoedien I' (Berlin 1904) 268, 283. 11 For more on the Algerian trip, see Stewart, op.cit. (supra n.6) 57-59. 106 VERRALL ON EURIPIDES' SUPPLIANTS 939fI have before this received sheets 1 and 2, with my notes, such as they are. 3 and 4 are just going off with this. Now for the remarks to which I refer on Suppl. 939 etc.-the final scene of the Suppl. apparently assumes that the pyre required for burning the recovered dead is al­ ready built. Nothing is said about building it. This is natural. There has been ample notice; some time has apparently elapsed even since the arrival of the army at Eleusis, and it would be rather strange and surprising if the pyre were not ready. But how comes it that the pyre ofCapaneus is also ready? The intention to burn his corpse separately, at the temple, is only announced at 934. Yet his funeral proceeds immediately along with the rest. Apparently this pyre also is al­ ready made, but for some other purpose. Now v. 939, as given in the MSS., with o:th6C, asserts precisely this. Theseus proposes to make a pyre for Capaneus at the temple. Adrastus replies "The servants (of the temple) must naturally be engaged in that task already"-