Laudator Temporis Acti

S. Douglas Olson, "Methodological Reflections on the Text and Action of Sophocles' Tereus (S. Fr. 583 + POxy. 5292)," Logeion: A Journal of Ancient Theatre 10 (2020) 168-186 (at 184-185):

— Analogy is a potentially useful form of argument when other, better evidence is lacking, but has significant limits due to the fact that it serves to seek commonalities between different objects. Put another way, analogy functions until it does not, and identifying the point at which "same" turns into "different" is a fundamentally subjective enterprise. Arguments that depend on a mix of literary analogy and psychological plausibility — what a character "might do" or "should do" in a particular situation — are particularly treacherous, because they are easily influenced by the modern reader's own sense of what is right and possible. This issue becomes particularly troubling in the case of fragmentary texts, for which context must be reconstructed (generally on the basis of a mix of analogy and other, even more subjective factors.

— Elaborate "house­-of-­cards" arguments are inherently dubious, and the more elaborate they become, the less likely they are to be correct. They are accordingly to be avoided on principle, the practical methodological difficulty here being that individual scholars may have a different sense of how many "cards" is one too many. As a corollary to this rule, further hypotheses based on such constructions by another scholar are even less likely to be correct than the original hypothesis.

— Ancient evidence must be carefully distinguished from modern constructions based on it. The former takes priority when the two come into conflict, and arguments that reject original sources in favor of modern hypotheses should be viewed with deep suspicion.

Related post: A House of Cards.