Abstract

The writer recently examined the two palimpsest folios of the manuscript Parisinus gr. 107B, otherwise known as the Codex Claromontanus, which contain most of the surviving passages of Euripides' Phaethon. Despite the damaging effects of the chemical reagents used in the nineteenth century the text is not wholly illegible and a collation was made where possible. A comparison of this with the standard texts published by Nauck, von Arnim, and Volmer revealed some puzzling discrepancies; it looks as if recent editors have not examined the manuscript, basing their work on their predecessors' false reports of the collation by Blass. Nauck writes : ‘quoniam vero programmata academica in paucorum manus perveniunt, haud gravabor quae Blass legit hoc loco repetere’. von Arnim shows in his preface that he copied from Nauck, and Volmer says : ‘J. de Arnim omnia tragoediae Euripideae fragmenta contulit in Supplemento Euripideo, quem librum prae aliis commentationibus in fabula restituenda adhibeo’. In future scholars who turn their attention to the Phaethon would do well to go back to the collation by Blass, but this too seemed faulty to me at certain points