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Notes on the Oresteia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

E. R. Dodds
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford

Extract

This line has been thought corrupt by most editors, though there is no agreement on the remedy. The Herald is plainly asking why the people at home are despondent: picks up the Chorus's phrase . But as Wilamowitz says, ‘ de populo aut senatu Argivorum accipi non potest’: it can only mean the army at Troy, as in lines 538 and 545. The usual inference is that arparw is corrupt.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1953

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References

page 11 note 1 For used of feelings cf. Soph. Ajax 1216 and Xen. Cyrop. 6. 2. 33

page 12 note 1 Verrall assumed a suppressed major premiss: ‘(Only the children of infanticides haunt a house); these children are haunting the house: these are children of infanticides.’ But could Aeschylus expect his audience to supply mentally as a premiss something which has left, so far as I know, no trace elsewhere in Greek literature?

page 12 note 2 Martin; Hartung; Bamberger; Thiersch; Rauchenstein; H. L. Ahrens; Maehly: a deplorable collection.

page 13 note 1 Proc. S.P.R. xliii (1935), 463.Google Scholar

page 13 note 2 Ibid. xxxiv (1924), 262.

page 13 note 3 Cf. Prof. Murray's remark, ibid. xxix (1916) 62, that ‘some of the information which seems to come most clearly and rapidly, as when I feel a certain emotional atmosphere, or the country to which an incident belongs, or the fact that it is in a book and not in real life, does not seem to be the sort that could well be conveyed by mere sense impressions of the canonical sort’.

page 13 note 4 Apol. 22 c, Meno 99 c, Ion 534 cd, Soph. 252 c. Cf. Ar. Vesp. 1019 f.

page 13 note 5 In the last line of Pindar's tenth Pythian may have its first syllable short; but in tragedy seems invariably to make position.

page 14 note 1 I think we can rule out the view that should be divided, one word depending on , the other on or are surely a pair, as in the anonymous line (trag. adesp. 504).

page 15 note 1 There can hardly be any objection to the substitution of a spondaic anceps for a tribrach; the heavy anceps balances the heavy anceps of the next dipody,

page 16 note 1 Reported by Lesky, , Wien Sitzb. vol. ccxxi. iii. 35.Google Scholar

page 16 note 2 -compounds are for some reason rare: L.S. quotes only , from Galen. But Aeschylus favoured the analogous - compounds: he has in this play, at 713, and fragm. 338.

page 17 note 1 e.g. Menexenus 234 b, ‘the Council is going to choose some one to make a speech over thedead’.

page 17 note 2 Cf. Cobet, , Var. Lect., p. 217;Google ScholarThompson, Maunde, Palaeography, p. 148.Google Scholar

page 18 note 1 For with a verb involving motion cf. Eur. Andr. 1064 Rhesus 511

page 19 note 1 P. B. R. Forbes, however, wrote in C.R. Ixii (1948), 104 that the passage ‘deprecateslowering the qualification for entrance to the Areopagus’.Google Scholar

page 20 note 1 C.A.H. v. 100 gives the year of Mnesitheides, 457/6, as the date of the law. But Professor Wade-Gery has pointed out to methat the law must belong to the preceding year, since Mnesitheides was elected under it.

page 21 note 1 Agam. 1534–6 is similarly explained by Murray. But there I incline to accept Wilamowitz's