Forensic jargon or cooperative speech? Aeschylus, Suppliants 274-276, the crasis of ὡς, and Grice's Maxims

The transmitted text of Aeschylus, Suppliants raises intriguing problems of language, logic, and dramatic technique, and it has been subjected to relentless emendation. An influential outcome of this debate is West's Teubner edition, which emends καί to χὠς (Sommerstein) and πάντα to πιστά (Zakas). But crasis of ὡς is nowhere found in Attic texts of any age, and the double emendation restores legal language inappropriate to the situation. The paradosis is satisfactorily explained by marking strong punctuation between καὶ ταῦτ' ἀληθῆ and πάντα προσφύσω λόγῳ. Thus reconstructed, lines 274-276 provide the earliest full combination known in any language of the four Maxims compounding the Cooperative Principle famously advocated by Paul Grice.