Antigones 2.0

NB: I am posting the working materials both as a corpus that others may use and also to help find remaining errors. I created these digital transcriptions using the Tesseract OCR Engine. Tesseract is probably not the best system for Ancient Greek (that would certainly be Bruce Robertston's Lace, but I was easily able to download and run Tesseract and its results were "good enough." I have compared each edition to at least two other editions and corrected the OCR errors but there are still errors to be found. If you want to read some Greek, why not pick an edition of the Antigone and see if you come upon issues? Use the Github issues page to submit corrections or create a pull request.

The title of this site pays tribute to George Steiner's 1984 book, Antigones. The work presented here represents a much more modest step towards a broader tasks. The work here focuses on the variations among selected editions of the Greek text published from 1806 to the present (a task which could ultimately become comprehensive, if preliminary results suggest such extra deta)

The goal is to compare a reasonable sampling of Greek editions of the Antigone, beginning with Bothe's 1806 Berlin edition and ending with Mark Griffith's edition in his Cambridge Commentary. I want to explore the actual variation across almost two hundred years of textual scholarship. How often do editions differ from one another? How much do those variants matter? How, in fact, do we define these two questions?

I expect to use the following criteria to quantify difference among editions:

1. Othrographic variants: basically diferences in spelling in which I can't see any significant meaning

2. Morphological variation: e.g., the same bugt in different cases.

3. Lexical variation: e.g., the same grammatical form but differrent dictionary words.

4. Syntactic variation: e.g., an editorial decision that entails a different syntactic analysis. Here I will use the Treebank developed by Franesco Mambrini as a starting point.

5. Semantic variation: e.g., an editorial decision entails some change to the modern language translation. Here my default measure will be whether I think that a change requires me to add a variant to Jebb's translation.

The list below includes both major new editions as well as bilingual editions (Greek/French, Greek/English, Greek/German) where the translator largely followed another edition. The critical editions may have more authority for specialists but the Greek text adopted in the bilingual editions, through the accompanying translations, serves a much broader potential audience. (In the case of the Greek text that accompanies the 1949 edition of Reinhardt's translation, I can't find an indication of which edition was the source -- I suspect Dindordf but this is something I will establish as I compare the texts to one another).

EU guidelines allow member states to exercise copyright over scholary editions for us to 30 years after publication. German law provides for only 25 years of copyright protection for scholarly editions. The UK and US follow a different tradition of copyright law and so I have been cautious.

Eleven editions are therefore available here for download (in the greek subdirectory).

1. 1806: Sophoclis Dramata quae supersunt et deperditorum fragmenta Graece et Latine, Richard Brunck and Friedrich Bothe (Weidmann, Leipzig)

2. 1830: Sophoclis Tragoediae, Editio Tertia, Karl Erfurdt and Gottfried Hermann (Fleischer, Leipzig)

3. 1858: Antigone, Expliquée littéralement et annotée par M. Benloew et traduit en français par M. Bellaguet (Hachette, Paris)

4. 1884: Des Sophokles Antigone, griechisch und deutsch, August Boeckh (Teubner, Leipzig)

5. 1906: Sophocles, the text of the seven plays, Richard Claverhouse Jebb (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK)

6. 1912: Sophocles, with an English Translation, Francis Storr (Loeb Classical Library, Macmillan Company, New York)

7. 1924: Sophoclis Fabulae, Alfred Chilton Pearson (Oxford Classical Texts, Oxford University Press, Oxford)

8. 1949: Sophokles Antigone, übersetzt mit grieschischem Text (Helmut Küpper, Godesberg, 1949)

9. 1955: Sophocle, Tome I: Les Trachiniennes, Antigone, Alponse Dain (Greek text), Paul Mazon (French translation) (Budé, Les Belles Lettres, Paris)

10. 1978: Sophoclis Fabulae, II: Oedipus Tyrannus, Antigona, Trachiniae, Aristides Colonna (Aug[usta] Taurinorum : Inaedibus Io. Bapt. Paravia, Torino)

11. 1979: Sophoclis Tragoediae, Tom. II: Trachiniae, Antigone, Philoctetes, Oedipus Coloneus, Roger David Dawe (Teubner, Leipzig)

The following are not available because of the uncertainty of UK copyright over editions.

12. 1987: Antigone, Andrew Brown (Aris and Phillips, Warminster, Wiltshire, England)

13. 1994: Sophocles: v2, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus at Colonus (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA)

14. 1999: Sophocles, Antigone, Mark Griffith (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Cambridge University Press)

Translations

For now the following are available in the translations folder:

1. Latin -- Bothe 1806 (see above)