Paléographie

Very light foxing to textblock else Fine. ; 288 pages; This remains the major book on Aeschylus' Supplices, its dating and the trilogy to which it belonged. Its first appearance, in 1969, was a response to the publication of a papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, which indicated a late production date (the 460s BC) for Aeschylus' play. This upset the previous consensus that it was the earliest Greek tragedy to survive: there was, Garvie argued, no longer good reason to suppose that the play belonged to an early stage in its author's development. The book also examines the evidence for reconstruction of the other, lost plays of the trilogy. Garvie remains convinced that, even without the additional testimony of the papyrus, all the internal from the text of the play points to the 460s, though some have tried to pull it back to the 470s because it feels like an early play. Some of the salutary lessons to be drawn from the discovery of the papyrus have still to be learnt.