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Notes on the Bacchae1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
In 246 we should, as Dodds suggests, get rid of the feeble δεινς and adopt Mau's δειν κγχνης. (Dodds suggests that K was misread as IC and the resulting δειναῖς was ‘corrected’ to δεινς.) Verdenius, Mnemos. 41 (1988), 254, defends the reading of the MSS., saying that δεινς serves to distinguish the noose of punishment from that of suicide, but this is untenable: why is one noose more ‘terrible’ than the other, and who on hearing ‘worthy of the terrible noose’ would draw conclusions about it that could not be drawn from ‘worthy of the noose’? The question raised about the kind of noose is important (see below) but cannot be answered by these means.
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References
2 See Sansone, D., ‘On Hendiadys in Greek’, Glotta 62 (1984), 16–26.Google Scholar
3 Dawe, R. D., RhM 123 (1980), 223–4.Google Scholar
4 The last person to write on this problem, Neuburg, M., AJP 107 (1986), 251–2Google Scholar, wants to take τδ' as appositive to ἰδχν: ‘It costs but little to hold that whatever the divine may be has this as its strength: that which has been instituted by much time, and that which has always existed by nature.’ But surely the Greek for ‘to have this as its strength’ is ἰδχὺν τνδ' ἔχειν.
5 These lines are not an apologia for Dionysiac religion per se but, as their context shows, an argument for piety in general and against impiety. Cf. the way that the Chorus and Teiresias commend the worship of Dionysus as ‘what is always lawful’ (71) and ‘the usages and practices of the lowly mass of people’ (430–1) and disparage irreligion as ‘living outside the laws’ (331), ‘lawless folly’ (387), and (slightly different) ‘practices that are outside of justice’ (1009–10).
6 Neuburg has them anatomizing the divine into ‘a combination of nomos and phusis’ (emphasis original).
7 See especially Ehrenberg, V., ‘Die Anfänge des griechischen Naturrechts’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophic 35 (1923), 119–43Google Scholar, who shows (138–43) that Euripides' language is unaffected by this antithesis and that νμος is never in Euripides ‘the merely conventional’: ‘Tatsächlich finden wir in Euripides, obwohl es immer wieder behauptet wird, die eindeutige Gegenüberstellung νμωι-ϕδει nicht ein einziges Mal’. Fr. 920 N2 seems to be the only exception, but whoever said ‘My nature willed it, that cares not for laws’ may not have intended to emphasize the conventionality of those laws but merely the strength of his own natural inclination. I discuss this subject with reference to Hec. 798ff. in The Heroic Muse (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 144–5Google Scholar nn. 53 and 56. Note too that in Herodotus νμος is not merely the conventional but has a considerable element of natural validity, so that ‘he lay with her in an unnatural way’ (1.61.1) is μσγετ ο οὐ κατ νμον. All this is in spite of the consciousness that customs differ: see Pindar fr. 215, a reference I owe to Dr Dawe.
8 Defence should start, as Dr Dawe pointed out to me, with K.-G. II 15 An. 13 where expressions like ἂξιον ἰδεῖν, ‘worthy to be seen’, are discussed. In the absence, however, of evidence that οἶς τε was so used, we must look on our passage with suspicion.
9 It is also odd that for ‘to look on’ Euripides chose a word that normally means ‘to see’. Grégoire's Budé translation is unusually frank: ‘O douleur sans mesure, et qu'on ne saurait voir!’ (emphasis mine).