political play, but our ability to date it to about 442 does not derive from
any internal evidence.

Our earliest manuscript containing the surviving plays dates from the
tenth century A.D. While these plays seem to have come to us relatively
free of the kind of corruption handwritten manuscripts inevitably suffer,
they are not perfect facsimiles of Sophocles' holograph. Consequently,
the reader will find in this commentary discussions of words, phrases, lines
and passages variously labeled "spurious," "corrupt," "interpolated," and
the like. The causes for textual corruption are varied. Sophocles wrote
for a specific production, not for a printed edition. Since few plays of any
of the dramatists were given a second production in Athens during the
fifth century, the need for a reliable text was not immediate. No doubt
copies of the plays circulated privately, and there must have been produc-
tions in other cities of the Greek world, but the playwright had no
copyright and no control over the text or subsequent uses of his text.
Professional copyists of later times made mistakes in transcription, and
we can be sure that informal copies made by actors for their own use
were even more subject to the vicissitudes of time. Some changes in the
text were introduced accidentally, others were the result of particular
requirements of new performances. For example, it has been argued that
the conclusion of the Oedipus the King has been modified from Sophocles'
original version to make the Oedipus at Colonus follow it more consis-
tently (perhaps twenty-five years separated the first appearances of these
two plays, which were not part of a Theban trilogy). Apart from changes
made by actors, there were defects occasioned even by those whose inten-
tions were to reproduce a sound text. Ancient scholarship in the post-
Aristotelian period sought to secure historically accurate texts. Inevitably
scholars disagreed. Their notes and emendations, known as scholia, ap-
peared in the margins of ancient manuscripts, and now and then a copyist
inadvertently introduced into the new copy a marginal gloss, variant
reading, or erroneous correction. Some of these errors are easily spotted,
but fourteen hundred years of transcription "codified" others, so that
modern scholarship can only make educated speculations about the nature
and extent of the corruption. Fortunately, the Sophoclean text is fairly
sound, and there is no reason to believe that we have lost from any of the
extant plays even a single page.

Several criteria enable scholars to spot textual corruption. Perhaps
the most important stems from the fact that these are verse dramas. The
spoken passages are in iambic trimeters (three units of the form ^{X - ̮ -} ,
where - is a long syllable, ̮ a short syllable, and ^X is common, i.e., either
long or short); less frequently we find meters such as the hexameter (base
unit -

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