I had never seen or heard of the Cambridge Translations from Greek Drama series until I picked up Ajax and Philoctetes at the Green Valley Book Fair on Saturday. They look quite useful for monoglot students of tragedy, and not entirely useless for scholars and teachers. I’m wondering how I managed to miss a whole series of books whose first title (of ten) came out ten years ago. Does Focus completely dominate this particular segment of the market for translated tragedies? I should probably mention that the Book Fair only had one copy of each, so no one will waste time looking for them there.

Here are my nominations:

1. In a Greek text: In Volume I of R. D. Dawe’s Teubner Sophocles (1975), the first word of Oedipus Tyrannus is misspelled. The fact that it’s a one-letter word is particularly impressive:

 τέκνα Κάδμου τοῦ πάλαι νέα τροφή

This was corrected to Ὦ in the second edition (1984).

2. In a Latin text: In D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s Teubner text of Horace, the last word of the Horatian corpus is misspelled, turning Horace’s leech who will not let go until full of blood into a bird, specifically a swallow:

non missura cutem nisi plena cruoris hirundo

I’m told this was corrected to hirudo in later printings.

3. In a secondary source: In the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, II: Latin Literature (253), one of the most famous sentences in the Latin language is botched:

Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientiam nostram?

It looks like some officious proofreader ‘corrected’ the case of the last two words, forgetting the rule about ‘utor, fruor, fungor, vescor, potior, and their compounds’ and assuming that abutor takes the accusative like a normal verb.