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Read about the evidence
Plutarch (Plut. Mor.).

But the formula by which Aeschines calls upon the grammateus to read aloud a segment of poetry raises for me many questions. What text does the grammateus read when he is called upon to do so? Is it one provided by Aeschines? What kind of state texts, if any, existed for Homer and the tragedians? I would like to explore the question of state regulation of dramatic texts in the context of the definition of poetry that I have given above—that is the common intellectual and moral property of the dēmos. To what extent, and more importantly, why did the Athenian democracy regulate that possession? Plutarch’s Lives of the Ten Orators (Plut. Mor. 841F) mentions a Lycurgan law that called for official state copies of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides to be placed in the Metroon:

τὸν δέ, … χαλκᾶς εἰκόνας ἀναθεῖναι τῶν ποιητῶν, Αἰσχύλου Σοφοκλέους Εὐριπίδου, καὶ τὰς τραγῳδίας αὐτῶν ἐν κοινῷ γραψαμένους φυλάττειν καὶ τὸν τῆς πόλεως γραμματέα παραναγινώσκειν τοῖς ὑποκρινομένοις·

Read about the evidence
Plutarch (Plut. Mor.).

[Next he proposed] that bronze statues of the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides be set up, and that written copies of their tragedies be guarded in the public treasury and that the grammateus of the polis read them out publicly (παραναγινώσκειν) to the actors. (Plutarch Lives of the Ten Orators 841F)

It is generally believed that this was done to protect the texts from actors’ or other kinds of interpolation which was corrupting the textual tradition of the plays and likewise their subsequent performance, and the verb παραναγινώσκειν has another meaning that may be relevant here, which is “to collate” or “to compare”. That the texts would need to be protected from insertions is an interesting one to which I will return.

Read about the evidence
Thucydides (Thuc.).

For the moment I am interested in the word φυλάττειν (“to guard” or “to protect”) which Plutarch tells us was the purpose of the law. This word has a military connotation which is intriguing, but it also turns the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides into a ktēma (a “possession”) of the sort Thucydides hoped his history would be (Thuc. 1.22). This is a possession that the Athenian dēmos wants to keep and store away in the Metroon in its function as a treasury, in order to regulate and control how that possession is used. The Metroon is also of course the Athenian archive, a place where laws are kept. The grammateus in fact, that same figure who as we have seen reads out the laws and affidavits and citations of poetry to the jury, according to the law of Lycurgus will read out the plays to the actors so that they can learn their parts. It is not clear whether the actors were even allowed to make copies for themselves (and again the meaning of the verb παραναγινώσκειν comes in to play here).

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