The Chorus in Greek Tragedy According to the Ancient Commentaries

The remains of ancient commentaries, transmitted in the margins of a number of manuscripts of the Greek tragedians, have been known to scholars since the Renaissance. 1 Is there anything new to be discovered in these notes, which can often seem banal, cryptic or confused? They have of course been assiduously studied over the centuries by scholars in search of textual variants, of quotations drawn from lost works, of historical or mythological information that may be contained within them, but the literary interests and judgments of the commentators have received little attention. Only in the past twenty years or so, in fact, have these texts begun to be studied systematically, with a view to discovering the critical principles and reading habits of their authors. 2