Abstract

Ajax is the subject of intonat, but little else is certain. Various punctuations are on offer, and even the authenticity of lines 545 and 546 is questioned; the difficulties are set out in Professor Tarrant's commentary . My concern is focused solely on 545 and the word nunc, printed in the text of the recent Oxford Classical Text and obelized by Professor Zwierlein. I suggest that the original word in this part of the line was saeuum, a standing epithet of the sea. Written seuum, its initial syllable might have disappeared through haplography; that would have left uum to be transformed into something else. E came up with a word close to the ductus, nunc; the A-tradition added se either to mend the metre or perhaps to indicate the omitted syllable. If saeuum is a plausible emendation, we might at least keep 545 as a piece of direct speech introduced by intonat, exactly as at Phaed. 1065 magnum intonat