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The plays of Euripides, like those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, were circulated in written form in the fifth century among literary members of the audience and performers at minor festivals, as aide-memoirs.
However, literary conventions that we take for granted today had not yet been inventedthere was no spacing between words, no consistency in punctuation nor in vowel elisions, no marks for breathings and accent ( guides to pronunciation and hence word recognition ), no convention to denote change of speaker and no stage directions, and verse was written straight across the page like prose.
Possibly those who bought texts supplied their own interpretative markings.
Papyri discoveries have indicated, for example, that a change in speakers was loosely denoted with a variety of signs, such as the equivalent of the modern dash, colon and full-stop.
The absence of modern literary conventions, which are an aid to comprehension, was an early and persistent source of errors affecting transmission of the text.
Errors crept in also when Athens replaced its old Attic alphabet with the Ionian alphabet, a change sanctioned by law in 403-2 BC, adding a new complication to the task of copying.
Many more errors came from the tendency of actors to interpolate words and sentences, producing so many corruptions and variations that a law was proposed by Lycurgus of Athens in 330 BC "... that the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should be written down and preserved in a public office ; and that the town clerk should read the text over with the actors ; and that all performances which did not comply with this regulation should be illegal.
" The law was soon disregarded and some actors continued to make their own changes up until about 200 BC, after which the habit dies out.
It was about then that Aristophanes of Byzantium compiled an edition of all the extant plays of Euripides, collated from pre-Alexandrian texts, furnished with introductions and accompanied by a commentary that was ' published ' separately.
This became the ' standard edition ' for the future and it featured some of the literary conventions that modern readers expectthere was still no spacing between words, little or no punctuation and no stage directions, but abbreviated names now denoted changes of speaker, lyrics are broken into ' cola ' and ' strophai ' or lines and stanzas, and a system of accentuation was introduced.

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