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The hoopoe's nest: Aristophanes, Birds 265–6

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

E. M. Craik
E. M. Craik
Affiliation:
Kyoto University and (honorary) University of St Andrews
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Extract

The appearance of Nan Dunbar's important commentary on Birds is to be welcomed. Inevitably, however, such a volume requires addenda et corrigenda; and already the author must be collecting material for a second edition. Here is some pabulum. On the passage cited, Dunbar comments, ‘The difficulties of this sentence stem from uncertainty over (a) the form and sense of the main verb … and (b) the point of χαραδρι⋯ν μιμο⋯μενος and its connection with what precedes …’

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , May 1998 , pp. 292 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1998

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References

1 Aristophanes' Birds, ed. and comm. (Oxford, 1995).

2 Many years ago, lecturing on Birds at the University of St Andrews, I suggested this interpretation of the text, noting from LSJ s.v. the sense ‘become stinking’, and from bird books the fact that soiling by ordure of its nest is a characteristic habit of the hoopoe.

3 Cf. K. J. Dover, Aristophanes' Clouds, ed andcomm. (Oxford, 1968), on the scale of medical terminology in Aristophanes' day.Google Scholar

4 This line, should perhaps be read rather that is with the verbal form changed from aorist middle imperative, to aorist active infinitive (in exclamatory sense), and with the second comma deleted. The expression is then syntactically integrated rather than interjectional, and has its common demonstrative force, designating something (here, defecation) which the speaker cannot, or prefers not to, name. The usage here is a natural extension of that most common in Aristophanes, of the pudenda. (On this sense of the idiom, see Moorhouse, CQ 13 [1963], at pp. 22–3 and 24; Lowe, BICS 20 [1973], at p. 101.) The dismayed and disgusted reaction to the further stream of droppings is verbally allusive, but would be visually clear.

5 See my article, ‘The staging of Sophokles’ Philoktetes and Aristophanes' Birds', in Craik, E. M. (ed.), Owls to Athens (Oxford, 1990), pp. 81–4.Google Scholar

6 See Collins Field Guide to the Birds of Britain on the nightingale's habitat, ‘thickets of all kinds... in woods, copses, commons, heaths and overgrown hedgerows’.