Laudator Temporis Acti

Euripides, Medea 153-154 (tr. David Kovacs):

Death will come all too quickly: do not pray for it.

σπεύσει θανάτου τελευ-
τά· ηδὲν τόδε λίσσου.

τελευτά Weil: τελευτάν codd.

Donald J. Mastronarde ad loc.:

σπεύσεις θανάτου τελευτάν 'will you hasten the end that is death?' A second-person question is best here, since the point must be that death will come soon enough for a mortal, so one should not seek it out. Blaydes' σπεύσεις, a small change of the variant σπεύσει, is needed; adjusting σπεύσει to unambiguous second person σπεύσηι is less attractive because the middle is unlikely (the active appears over 70 times in tragedy, the middle once in Aeschylus). Some follow Weil in altering to τελευτά and keeping σπεύσει as third person (Kovacs: 'death will come all too quickly'), but this is less attractive because σπεύδω normally has an animate subject and emphasizes intentional speed. Least likely is the interpretation of the scholiasts, who treat the verb as third person with ἔρος as the subject.

The passage isn't discussed in Kovacs' Euripidea (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), or in James Diggle, "On the Manuscripts and Text of Euripides, Medea: II. The Text," Classical Quarterly 34.1 (1984) 50-65. For σπεύσηι see C.W. Willink, "Euripides, Medea 131-213," in his Collected Papers on Greek Tragedy (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 486-503 (at 492):

ϲπεύϲηι seems acceptable for the sense 'Will you hasten death for yourself?'¹⁸ Diggle accepts ϲπεύϲειϲ (Blaydes). Kovacs prefers Weil's ϲπεύϲει … τελευτά· but can a τέλοϲ/τελευτή be said to ϲπεύδειν?

¹⁸ The middle is rare, but cf. A. Ag. 151 ϲπευδοµένα θυϲίαν. As Dale observed (on Hel. 664) 'there are so many verbs that sooner or later drop into a rare middle, especially in the future'.