Thus appear the ten verses of fr. 659 Radt from Sophocles’ Tyro in Lloyd-Jones’s Loeb edition and translation.Footnote ¹ The fragment comes from Aelian’s On the Nature of Animals and has recently been studied closely in an Italian doctoral dissertation and a related article by Cardinali.Footnote ² The first four verses are relatively unproblematic from a textual point of view, but the following verses contain a number of issues, reflected in the fact that Lloyd-Jones’s edition contains four conjectures: 5 πλαθεῖσα Reiske for σπασθεῖσα codd.; 6 αὐγασθεῖσά που Meineke for αὐγασθεῖσ’ ὑπὸ codd.; 7 φόβην Wakefield for φόβης codd.; 10 χλιδήν Brunck for φόβην codd. Lloyd-Jones adopted all these conjectures, and largely followed Radt in doing so. Radt, however, retained the reading of the manuscripts in line 6 (αὐγασθεῖσ’ ὑπό) and by placing the Greek words between daggers indicated that he regarded the text as corrupt beyond conjecture. Neither Radt nor Lloyd-Jones offer arguments for their choices.

Cardinali argued for restoring the text of the manuscripts in all these four cases; and she offers the following interpretation for the resulting text (5–10):

We propose to reexamine these six lines and offer another explanation for the text of the manuscripts, that, we believe, must be retained. To do so, we shall discuss these textual problems, which Cardinali has already scrutinized extensively, and offer fresh solutions.Footnote ⁵

In 5, the two main issues are, first, the fact that the verb σπάω in the sense of ‘to drag (away)’ allegedly implies motion rather than position, so that we either would have to alter the verb or change the preposition ἐν to ἐς plus accusative; and, second, the genitive at the end of the line which is difficult to interpret. σπάω obviously refers in its most literal sense to dragging, but it can also be used metaphorically for being stressed, as in Plato’s Laws (644e) where he states that ταῦτα τὰ πάθη ἐν ἡμῖν οἷον νεῦρα ἢ σμήρινθοί τινες ἐνοῦσαι σπῶσίν τε ἡμᾶς … (‘these affections that reside in us put stress on us like sinews or cords …’). In a medical context, in the passive voice, σπάομαι means ‘being affected by spasms’. It makes no dramatic sense to take σπασθεῖσα literally here in the sense that the filly is dragged onto the meadow to drink water. The herdsmen committed their abuse against her in the stables (μάνδραις ἐν ἱππείαισιν) and would hardly then ‘drag her’ to the meadow, her natural habitat. In his Dialogue on Love, Plutarch talks of ‘those who shear their mares, and then lead them to a river’ (τοῖς ἀποκείρουσι τὰς ἵππους εἶτα πρὸς ποταμὸν … ἄγουσι).Footnote ⁶ If Plutarch had the Tyro passage in mind, this would suggest that his source read σπασθεῖσα rather than πλαθεῖσα. Be that as it may, the participle σπασθεῖσα must have a physio-motoric meaning, and express the intense emotion with an embodied image: after the violence suffered at the hands of the herdsmen, the traumatized filly finds herself in the meadow, jumping skittishly around, leaping jerkily and nervously, dragged hither and thither by frustration and painful emotions; from the perspective of an observer, she appears to be convulsing. This abrupt quality of equine movement when under the effect of intense emotion (fear, joy, rage are the typical anthropomorphizing verbalizations) is a stock feature of Greek poetic imagery—for example, in Euripides’ Bacchae; a specific term for such animal movements is σκίρτημα.Footnote ⁷

Cardinali offers two interpretations for ποταμίων ποτῶν: first, as the destination where the filly is dragged; and second, as a genitive going with λειμῶνι, which would represent an easy solution to the problem.Footnote ⁸ The genitive can sometimes denote purpose, and therefore, one solution would be to understand ποταμίων ποτῶν with Hugh Lloyd-Jones as ‘to drink the water of the river’.Footnote ⁹

The next issue concerns αὐγασθεῖσ’ ὑπό; Diggle and Radt (as already mentioned) put this between daggers, thus indicating that the place is hopelessly corrupt.Footnote ¹⁰ As αὐγάζω literally means ‘to see clearly’, it could be deemed redundant after ἴδῃ. The word ὑπό appears to offer even greater difficulty. Ellendt and Genthe proposed to read it in enjambment with κουραῖς, but Cardinali notes that ‘κουραῖς is always attested simply in the dative and not with a preposition; moreover, the expression “under the locks (already) cut off” could not possibly have any understandable meaning’.Footnote ¹¹ The first of Cardinali’s points is without merit, as there are only two additional occurrences of κουραῖς in extant classical Greek literature.Footnote ¹² And we disagree with Cardinali (and others before her) who claim that the expression αὐγασθεῖσ’ ὑπὸ | κουραῖς ἀτίμως διατετιλμένης φόβης cannot make sense. Picture the distressed filly walking up to the water and lowering her head: now she sees the projected image (σκιᾶς εἴδωλον), as she looks at herself, ‘under the strands of her mane so disgracefully torn’. The reflected image is appraised from underneath the mangled mane and thus appears on the surface of the water.

In 10, previous editors appear to have been repulsed by the repetition of φόβην (‘mane’) and therefore replaced the reading of all the manuscripts with χλιδήν (‘graces’, ‘decoration’). Yet Greek poetic and especially tragic language admits of repetition.Footnote ¹³ In this case, the repetition is justified by the poetic intensification commanded by the context; once the genitive at line 7 is restored, moreover, the less acceptable perfect homophony and rhyme are avoided.Footnote ¹⁴

Therefore, we should be textually conservative and restore the original reading of the manuscripts, translating 5–10 as follows: