‘The Speaking Page’

Nearly a century after his death, Richard Jebb is the only Greek scholar of his generation whose publications are being reprinted on a heroic scale: the collected works, excluding commentaries and translations, in nine volumes and the Sophocles commentaries in seven. 1 Christopher Stray’s essay published alongside this one (Stray 2005) is one of three essays newly devoted to Jebb: the others are by Robert Todd in vol. 1 of the Collected Works (Jebb 2002: x–xvii) and myself in the general introduction accompanying each volume of the new edition of the plays (Easterling 2004a = this vol., Chapter 22). All three have been influenced by Roger Dawe’s acute and sympathetic reading of Jebb’s work, which brings out some of the features that distinguish it from typical late Victorian scholarship. 2