Notes on Notes

This paper has a simple objective: to look for traces of the responses of ancient readers and critics to some familiar and long-studied Greek texts. 1 My source material is the scholia vetera on Sophocles, the notes inherited from antiquity which are carried in the margins of some of the surviving manuscripts of the Byzantine period and which were much used by the compilers of the Suda lexicon. 2 They have been available in print since Janus Lascaris published them at Rome in 1518, and with this record of continuous transmission since antiquity one might think they had been exhaustively studied by now, but until recently their main interest for scholars has been the light they occasionally throw on the state of the text, 3 the antiquarian or mythological information that they sometimes preserve and their (considerable) value as sources of quotations from lost works. 4