The Laurentian MS.(L)

Since the first volume of this edition appeared, an autotype fac simile of the best and oldest ms. of Sophocles,–the Laurentian ms., of the early eleventh century,–has been published by the London Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. The defects of such a production are only those which are inseparable from every photographic process, and amount to this, that photography cannot render all the more delicate gradations of light and shade. Yet even here there is sometimes a gain to the student through the intensifying of faint strokes, as when in Tr. 1106, αὐ[θη]δείς, the erased letters θη become more legible in the photograph than they are in the ms. On the other hand such a photograph will, with the rarest exceptions, tell the student everything that he could learn from the ms. itself. Erasures are not among the exceptions, for they are almost invariably traceable in a good photograph. In this facsimile they are seen as clearly as in the original. It is often difficult or impossible for the collator of a ms. to foresee exactly every detail of which he may afterwards require a record; and it is obviously an inestimable advantage to have permanent access to a copy which not merely excludes clerical error, but is in all respects an exact duplicate. In 1882 I collated the Laurentian ms. at Florence, and I have now used the facsimile during several months of minute work on the text of this play, in the course of which I have had occasion to test it in every line, and in almost every word.