Does anyone have any insight into what happened to the new OCT Plato? The first volume was published in 1995, nearly two decades ago, and a separate edition of the Republic edited by Slings was published in 2003, but nothing else has appeared.
Some info at
http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/philosophy/groups/ancient-philosophy-edinburgh
where the project is said to be continuing “with a view to publication of Volume II in the near future.” We shall see. Vol.1 itself was many years delayed. Meanwhile, in addition to Slings’ Republic (Slings himself is now dead), Bernd Manuwald’s 2006 Protagoras commentary avails itself of Nicoll’s work on the text of that dialogue. It’s Nicoll who heads up the team, or did. I expect more OCT will appear eventually, and a lot of preparatory work has evidently been done, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. A younger generation of scholars will probably inherit the project.
It’s even worse with Malcolm Davies’ Poetarum Melicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (PMGF). Vol.1 appeared in 1991, with three more volumes promised at 2-year intervals. Since when, silence.
Reviews both of the Plato OCT vol.1 and of PMGF I in BMCR.
Thanks for the information, mwh. As happens with material first published a century ago, Burnet’s text is pretty much deprecated these days.
I was going to ask about Davies’ project, too, but I see from his website that he has been relieved of teaching duties for four years to complete two more volumes.
http://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/368-677/Professor-Malcolm-Davies.html
Maybe the accumulation of new papyrus material has something to do with the delay.
M. Davies was working on Stesichorus with P. Finglass a while back. There was a pretty cool conference at Johns with some pretty wonderful papers and table-talk (from whence, proceedings I think are going to come) and they were aiming at a complete commentary - not sure if that is finished yet or not. I guess that would be a pretty sizeable work actually. You could produce a tome on Stesi’s metrics and language alone. So that might explain the delay there.
Looks like that edition of Stesichorus can be pre-ordered at Amazon:
Yes Patrick Finglass rescued the Stesichorus commentary.
I don’t know why Burnet’s Plato OCT should be “deprecated.” It’s still a very fine edition, and no new OCT is going to give a significantly different text.
Not surprising, Patrick Finglass is isotheos.
“I don’t know why Burnet’s Plato OCT should be “deprecated.” It’s still a very fine edition, and no new OCT is going to give a significantly different text.”
Well, I’ve been reading Plato recently–currently, Dodd’s edition of Gorgias–and everyone seems to be rejecting Burnet’s readings right and left. Dodds himself seems to be in the mold of Denys Page or one of the older critics, boldly substituting conjectures everywhere. But I think he was one of the great scholars of the mid- to late 20th century, like Dover or Page or Denniston or Fraenkel, who knew Greek backwards and forwards, and didn’t hesitate to intervene when something didn’t feel right to them.
OK, let me amend that: “… a very significantly different text.”