Reading Sophocles with Manuel Moschopoulos

Long ago, when I first began research, I was set to work by Denys Page on manuscripts of Sophocles. A big question of the time was Alexander Turyn’s claim, on the basis of a large-scale study of the surviving manuscripts of the triad – Ajax , Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus – to have identified recensions of the text by Manuel Moschopoulos and Thomas Magistros as well as by Demetrios Triklinios, who already had a secure place in scholarly history. 1 Stemmatics was more popular then than it is now, and intense arguments revolved around the relationships between manuscripts, and particularly the evidence for conjecture, in the large numbers of recentiores copied around or after the time of the Palaeologan Renaissance. There was relatively little interest in the Byzantine commentaries and their content, except insofar as they helped to link particular manuscripts with particular scholars.