Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/221

 On some special difficulties in Pindar. 211 I. In Pyth. ii. 76, 11 (140, 141), the established reading is as follows : afiaxov kclkov dpcpoxepois 8iaj36iav virofyavTies, opycus dreves akoaireiccov i/ceXot. In my commentary on the passage, I have called attention to the fact, that in iEschyl. Agam. 11, we have the combination opyas drcvels, and that Hesiod uses drev^s as an epithet to voos in the passage: drevet re voa> Kai cirLcppovi fiovXjj, (Theog. 661). Every scholar must feel a suspicion that in Pindar's original text, dreves was not an adverb separated by a genitive dependent on dpyais from iKeXot, to which it belongs, and thus creating a sort of double hyperbaton ; but in some shape an epithet of the noun which it follows ; and as it is highly probable that the passage was known to iEschylus, who wrote the Oresteia some twenty years after the publication of this ode, and immediately after a visit to Sicily, we must take the passage in the Agamemnon as a confirmation of the impression, which we derive from the order of the words. The question really is, whether the text requires and admits such an alteration as would bring the usage of drev^s in the passage before us, into proper harmony with the passage of .iEschylus, which may have been built upon it, and a still more co- incident passage of Hesiod, which must have been known to Pindar. A sort of instinct seems to have guided all the inter- preters, ancient as well as modern, to a rendering of the passage which is not borne out by the words as they stand. It is felt that the masculine iKeXoi, no less than the force of the passage, requires a designation of person, instead of an abstract feminine noun like worries, which, to save the metre, is changed by Bockh into virofpavrus ; and we must read either vnocpaTces from vno(pT)Tvs, which is Hermann's suggestion, or imocpdropes, which is Bothe's conjecture. Then again it is felt that these " whisperers of calumnies," must in all propriety be compared not " to the ways of foxes," but " to foxes, in their ways or manners." Thus the Breslau Scholiast, published by C. E. C. Schneider in 1844, (Apparatus Pindarici Supplementum) says, (p. 14) : to Se xmocpdnes dvr tov t>7ro/3oXe7s Sta/3oXi<5j/, which seems to recognise a masculine noun in -f vs ; and again, to 8e aXwTrocwj/ tKeXot, dvri tov Trapp.TJxavoi Kai 14- 2