Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/126

 104 HISTORY OF GREECE. reached the opening of the Hellespont whin that admiral was barely apprized of its departure from Chios. When it am red at long circuit ont to sea. If it be supposed, which those who read o v ire7.u-/ia: must suppose, that Mindarus sailed first up the northern sl/ait betweer Chios and the mainland, and then turned his course east towards Phokaea this would have been the course which Thrasyllus expected that he would take ; and it is hardly possible to explain why he was not seen both by the Athenian scouts as well as by the Athenian garrison at their station of Delphinium on Chios itself. Whereas, by taking the circuitous route round the southern and western coast, he never came in sight either of one or the other : and he was enabled, when he got round to the latitude north of the island, to turn to the right and take a straight easterly course, with Lesbos on his left hand, but at a sufficient distance from land to be out of sight of all scouts. 'Avdyea&ai in r^f Xtou irehayiof (Xen. Hollen. ii. 1, 17), means to strike into the open sea, quite clear of the coast of Asia : that passage does not decisively indicate whether the ships rounded the southeast or the north- east corner of the island. We are here told that the seamen of Mindarus received from the Chiana per head three Chian tessarakostee. Now this is a small Chian coin, nowhere else mentioned ; and it is surprising to find so petty and local a denomina- tion of money here specified by Thucydides, contrasted with the different manner in which Xenophon describes Chian payments to the Peloponnesian seamen (Hellen. i, 6, 12; ii, 1, 5). But the voyage of Mindarus round the south and west of the island explains the circumstance. He must have landed twice on the island during this circumnavigation (perhaps starting in the evening), for dinner and supper : and this Chian coin, which prob- ably had no circulation out of the island, served each man to buy provisions at the Chian landing-places. It was not convenient to Mindarus to take aboard more provisions in kind, at the town of Chios ; because he had already aboard a stock of provisions for two days, the subsequent portion of his voyage, along the coast of Asia to Sigeium, during which he could not afford time to halt and buy them, and where indeed the territory was not friendly. It is enough if I can show that the old text of Thucydides will construe very well, without the violent intrusion of this conjectural o v. But I can show more : for this negative actually renders even the construction of the sentence awkward at least, if not inadmissible. Surely, cnralpovatv ov nehayiai, uA/ld, ought to be followed by a correlative adjective or participle belonging to the same verb cnraipovaiv : yet if we take e^ovrff as such cor- relative participle, how are we to construe exfaov 1 In order to express the sense which Haack brings out, we ought surely to have different word*, such as : OVK airypav kit TTJC Xicv TreAaytat, utJK if upiaripa TTJV Aiaftrv Ixovref enteov iirl TJ)V yirsipov. Even the change of tense from present to oast, when we follow the construction of Haack, is awkward ; while if w