There are two famous stories connected with the name of Athamas, which are recorded by our authorities with great variety of detail. One of these, the escape of Phrixus and Helle, was the starting-point of the Argonautic saga; and, though the evidence of the tragedians is the earliest to which we can now appeal, it must have been related in the lost epics. Athamas, king of Thebes, by his union with Nephele, an immortal, had two children, Phrixus and Helle. He subsequently married Ino, who bore to him Learchus and Melicertes. Ino was jealous of the children of Nephele, and, when a drought Occurred—produced, according to one version, by the cunning of Ino herself—she bribed the messengers who were sent by Athamas to consult the oracle at Delphi, and persuaded them to give a false report. They accordingly announced that the god required the sacrifice of Phrixus as an expiation. Athamas was obliged against his will to consent, but Nephele succeeded in saving her children by means of a ram with a golden fleece, which Hermes gave to her. This ram, placed among the flocks of Athamas, was not only endowed with the power of speech, so that it was able to warn Phrixus of his impending danger, but also rescued him and his sister by taking them on its back, and flying away with them across the sea. Helle, unable to keep her seat, fell into the sea, and gave her name to the Hellespont; but Phrixus escaped to Colchis, where he sacrificed the ram and presented its fleece to Aeetes.

The production of this book has been delayed by various causes, which require particular notice on the occasion of its appearance. It is well known that Sir Richard Jebb intended ultimately to include the Fragments in his edition of Sophocles; and in pursuance of this intention he delivered at Cambridge in the Michaelmas Term of 1895 a course of lectures on 132 selected fragments. The Ajax, the last to be published of the seven extant plays, appeared in the autumn of 1896; and it was then anticipated that the publication of the Fragments would be undertaken in due sequence. But the discovery of the Bacchylides papyrus drew the editor's attention in another direction, and, during the remainder of his life, the time which he could spare from public duties was mainly devoted to the preparation of a comprehensive edition of the Poems and Fragments of Bacchylides, which was published by the Cambridge University Press in 1905. Thus it fell out that, when after Sir Richard Jebb's death the task of completing the edition of Sophocles devolved upon Dr Walter Headlam, the material available for his use consisted solely of the notes prepared for the lectures already mentioned.

Once again misfortune attended the prosecution of the scheme, in consequence of the premature death of Dr Headlam before he was able to put into shape the preliminary labour which for a number of months he had expended upon the text. Towards the end of 1908 I was entrusted by the Syndics of the University Press with the papers of both scholars, in order that the work so long deferred might be brought to a conclusion.

The number of the plays

External evidence

The anonymous Life of Sophocles records on the authority External of Aristophanes of Byzantium that 130 plays were attributed to Sophocles, but that 17 of these were spurious. The statement is entitled to credit, as coming from Aristophanes; and it has been referred with high probability to his work entitled πρὸς ποὺς Καλλιμάχου πίνακας. Not much is known of the book in question, but it may be taken to have contained corrections and enlargements of the well-known πίνακες of Callimachus, which was not merely a catalogue of the books contained in the Alexandrian library, but included biographical details concerning the various authors, and in the case of the Attic drama the dates of the production of the several plays, as well as other points of interest drawn from the διδασκαλίαι of Aristotle.

Suidas, however, reports that Sophocles produced 123 plays, and according to some authorities considerably more. This information may be reconciled with the Life in two ways, i.e. by the adoption either of Boeckh's correction of Suidas, which makes the total 113 (ριγ′ in place of ρκγ′), or of Bergk's substitution of 7 for 17 (ζ′ for ιζ′) in the Life. The latter proposal is palaeographically the easier, and the number 123 agrees better than 113 with the remaining data, as will presently appear.

Number of victories

The number of his victories is also variously recorded. According to Suidas, they were twenty-four; according to the Life, which followed the authority of Caristius of Pergamum, twenty; and, according to Diodorus, only eighteen. The lastmentioned statement is now confirmed by the evidence of a recently discovered inscription.