The starting point of this brief discussion is the emendation in line 782 of Aeschylus' Septem proposed by M.L. West in his 1990 Teubner edition.Footnote 1 In the fifth strophe of the second stasimon, the chorus recollects the misfortunes that struck Oedipus when he finally discovered the truth about his marriage. This severely corrupt passage, whose original meaning was lost at an early stage of transmission, runs as follows:
782 δίδυμ' ἃ West 784 κρεισσοτέκνων M2PKQ1Tr κρείσσω τέκνων rell. κυρσοτέκνων Herm. δ' ὀμμάτων HaQTr δ' ἀπ᾽ ὀμμάτων rell. δωμάτων Schütz χρυσοτέχνων πωμάτων Verrall κρεισσοτέρων γνωμάτων West 785 ἀθλίας Prien ἀρχαίας Wil.
But when the miserable man became aware of his wretched marriage, vexed with pain in his frenzied heart, he committed double evil: with his parricidal hand †he wandered from his eyes, dearer than children†. But upon his sons he put bitter-tongued curses, angry on account of his †accursed† sustenance.
782 δίδυμα κάκ' The standard interpretation takes the δίδυμα κακά committed by Oedipus as relating, first, to his self-inflicted blinding (for this is what the expression ‘he wandered from his eyes’ in 784 presumably stands for) and, second, to his putting a curse on his sons, referred to in the first lines of the antistrophe (785–7). This, however, is counterintuitive, for the ‘double evil’ that is habitually associated with Oedipus is, rather, his twofold guilt of patricide and incest. The matter was given due attention by West, who wrote in this connection:
I believe that the δίδυμα κακά that Oedipus ἐτέλεσεν were the notorious twin evils of killing his father and marrying his mother. This is not the main clause but a further extension of the temporal clause that began in 778, and to make it so, all we have to do is to divide δίδυμα as δίδυμ' ἃ.Footnote 2
The emendation proposed by West would modify the rendering of Sept. 780–7 as follows:
But when the miserable man became aware of his wretched marriage, vexed with pain in his frenzied heart about the double evil he had committed with his parricidal hand, †he wandered from his eyes, dearer than children†. But upon his sons he put bitter-tongued curses, angry on account of his †accursed† sustenance.
As I will argue immediately, West's emendation allows us further to improve our understanding of the passage.
784: δ' ὀμμάτων Most manuscripts have δ' ἀπ᾽ ὀμμάτων; yet ἀπ᾽ is unmetrical and is therefore omitted, with or without δ', by all editors beginning with Triclinius and probably even earlier than that.Footnote 3 This, however, does not solve the problem of δ' ὀμμάτων ἐπλάγχθη: ‘he wandered from his eyes’ is blatantly nonsensical (‘sheer gibberish’ according to WestFootnote 4), and as a result has been subjected to various emendations. As far as I can see, the most economic solution is the one proposed by C.G. Schütz, who in his 1782 edition replaced δ' ὀμμάτων with δωμάτων.Footnote 5 Note, indeed, that the ensuing ‘he wandered from his house’ would produce a perfectly normal Greek expression which also makes sense in the context of the Oedipus myth (more below). Yet the syntax of the transmitted text had prevented the scholars from adopting this solution.Footnote 6 This changes, however, as soon as we accept West's δίδυμ' ἃ instead of the transmitted δίδυμα:
But when the miserable man became aware of his wretched marriage, vexed with pain in his frenzied heart about the double evil he had committed with his parricidal hand, he wandered from his house, †dearer than children†.Footnote 7 But upon his sons he put bitter-tongued curses, angry on account of his †accursed† sustenance.
785: ἀραίας The adjective is both metrically and semantically impossible. G. Murray and D. Page in their respective OCT editions adopted U. von Wilamowitz's ἀρχαίας; West in his Teubner text simply obelized it; A.H. Sommerstein in his recent Loeb edition re-introduced C. Prien's ἀθλίας, which had also been adopted by Hutchinson in his 1985 Oxford edition and commentary. Following the scholiast on Oedipus Coloneus 1375, the interpreters of the passage are almost unanimous in taking the genitive τροϕᾶς to which the adjective refers as alluding to the episode narrated in the lost cyclic Thebaid (fr. 3 West): Oedipus cursed his sons who had publicly disgraced him by sending an inferior cut of meat from the sacrificial animal.Footnote 8 But this scenario, suggesting as it does a single act of disrespect, does not square well with Aeschylus' τροϕή, viz. ‘nourishment’, ‘food’, ‘sustenance’, or the like. The latter would rather agree with the version of the Oedipus story presented in Sophocles' Oedipus Coloneus. In the First Episode of this tragedy, the exiled Oedipus repeatedly blames his sons for abandoning him to a beggarly existence in exile and praises his daughters for the sustenance they have been supplying (see esp. 440–7);Footnote 9 in the Fourth Episode Oedipus curses the sons on the same grounds, while again praising the daughters for being his real τροϕοί (see esp. 1365–9). In a context such as this, Prien's ἀθλίας seems to offer a viable alternative to Wilamowitz's ἀρχαίας.Footnote 10 On this interpretation, Septem 780–7 should be rendered as follows:
But when the miserable man became aware of his wretched marriage, vexed with pain in his frenzied heart about the double evil he had committed with his parricidal hand, he wandered from his house, †dearer than children†. But upon his sons he put bitter-tongued curses, angry on account of his wretched sustenance.
Oedipus' exile, later to become prominent in Sophocles' Oedipus plays and Euripides' Phoenissae,Footnote 11 is not referred to elsewhere in the Septem, and there are indications that, as in Homer, Oedipus is envisaged here as having ended his days in his native Thebes.Footnote 12 Yet exile, whether permanent or temporary, was the standard Greek practice for dealing with homicide, and it would be peculiar if the author of the Oresteia did not regard it as an integral part of the Oedipus story.Footnote 13 Whether the ‘wretched sustenance’ allotted to Oedipus relates to his shadowy existence in the royal palace of Thebes before going into exile, as in the Phoenissae, or to his later wanderings, as in Oedipus Coloneus, it would certainly supply sufficient reason for the curse. The reading I propose is, therefore, as follows:
782 δίδυμ' ἃ West 784 δωμάτων Schütz 785 ἀθλίας Prien
