The ancient scholia to Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus shed light on Alexandrian ways of engaging
with this play and are richer than those to the other Sophoclean plays. The last editor
Vittorio de Marco (1952) established a better text of these scholia than his predecessors in
as much as he had a fuller knowledge of their manuscript tradition and a better understanding
of their stratified nature. Still his work is marred by a number of inaccuracies omissions
and methodological shortcomings. The new edition by Georgios Xenis improves on de Marco's work
by a careful examination of all the sources of the text and the conjectures proposed by
scholars and by relying on a clearly defined methodological framework. In this edition the
scholia to the Oedipus at Colonus are restored in a textual state that is arguably the earliest
we can recover and is free of contradictions unacceptable repetitions and hybridisation or
blending of elements from different versions. The critical text is accompanied by a detailed
apparatus criticus and is contextualised in its ancient scholarly tradition by means of a rich
array of passages drawn from comparable sources. Extensive indices are provided at the end of
the volume. The edition will be an invaluable resource for those engaged in the interpretation
of Sophocles' tragedies and in particular of the Oedipus at Colonus and will be of interest
to classicists working on ancient literary criticism and ancient scholarship.
