Laudator Temporis Acti

Sophocles, Electra 1505-1507 (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones):

The punishment should come at once to all
who who would act outside the laws—
death. Then crime would not abound!

χρῆν δ᾽ εὐθὺς εἶναι τήνδε τοῖς πᾶσιν δίκην,
ὅστις πέρα πράσσειν τι τῶν νόμων θέλει,
κτείνειν· τὸ γὰρ πανοῦργον οὐκ ἂν ἦν πολύ.

R. Renehan, "The New Oxford Sophocles," Classical Philology 87 4 (October, 1992) 335-375 (at 357-358):

"Most modern readers find these lines intolerably flat, and Dindorf cut them out as an interpolation; but there is no strong objection to them on the score of style or language . . . a little more weight attaches to the absence from tragedy apart from 1505 of the use of εὐθύς that is found in the phrase εὐθὺς ἀπ' ἀρχῆς:. . . An editor has a duty to signal doubt, but the grounds for excision seem to us not quite strong enough to compel us to place the lines between brackets, as Dawe does . . . " (Sophoclea). I find such an approach a model of caution in murky waters. There is one questionable use of language which seems to have gone unnoticed, namely τοῖς πᾶσιν as antecedent to ὅστις. Kaibel remarks ad loc.: "An den Plural τοῖς πᾶσιν schliesst sich in bekannter Weise der Singular an (z. B. Eur. El. 934)," and that, of course, is perfectly correct. Jebb also cites a few parallels; for the sense construction see further K.-G. 1:56-57. However, the normal combinations are πᾶς ὅστις and πάντες ὅσοι. See LSJ s.v. ὅστις I ad fin.: " . . . in Trag. and Att. sts. strengthd. by an antec. πᾶς, but only in sg., ἅπας δὲ τραχὺς ὅ. ἂν νέον κρατῇ A. Pr. 35, cf. Th. 8.90 (πάντες ὅσοι being commonly used in pl., not πάντες οἵτινες; but πᾶσιν . . . ὅστις ἐρωτᾷ IG I².410)." There are several prose examples of a plural form of πᾶς followed by a singular form of ὅστις: Thuc. 7.29.4 πάντας ἑξῆς, ὅτῳ ἐντύχοιεν . . ., Xen. Cyr. 5.3.50 πάντας . . . ὅτῳ τι προστάττοι, 8.2.25 παρεῖχε πάντα ὅτου ἔδει. (IG, loc. cit., is a hexameter verse from an elegiac couplet.) Thus the sequence . . . πᾶσιν . . . ὅστις, while not unparalleled, is unusual and, so far as I know, it would be unique in tragedy. However what we actually find here is not πᾶσιν . . . ὅστις, but τοῖς πᾶσιν . . . ὅστις. That sequence, article and all, is absolutely unique, and, to my ear at least, inelegant. Can it really be Sophoclean?