This new Oxford Classical Text of Sophocles is the product of many years of close collaboration between the two editors. Most of the major difficulties of text and interpretation have been discussed in graduate seminars held in Oxford. The evidence of the manuscript tradition has been carefully assessed, and the results of one important discovery have been exploited for the first time. It has also been possible to take account of many little-known or forgotten conjectures, mostly due to critics of the nineteenth century, and some of these have been adopted or given a place in the apparatus criticus. A number of other conjectures are correctly attributed for the first time, and in a few passages the editors have ventured to offer proposals of their own.

This new text of Sophocles is the product of many years of close collaboration between the two editors. The evidence of the manuscript tradition has been carefully assessed, and the results of one important discovery have been exploited for the first time. It has also been possible to take account of many little known or forgotten conjectures. A number of other conjectures are correctly attributed for the first time, and in a few passages the editors have ventured to offer proposals of their own.

'The new Oxford Classical Text (OCT) of Sophocles and its companion volume, Sophoclea (Soph.), make important contributions to scholarship by the editors' handling of traditional scholarly problems, their lively response to recent work, especially that of R.D. Dawe, and their many original suggestions ... the two volumes under review mark real progress in the study and understanding of Sophocles. Filled with original ideas and the humane assimilation of earlier work, they challenge the contemporary scholar to absorb their contributions and to go on, by means of further collation and rethinking, to understand the text of Sophocles, the process of its survival, and what he might mean to our day.' E. Christian Kopff, University of Colorado, Boulder, American Journal of Philology 114 (1993)