“Apollo, my leader, whither hast thou led me?”
In this Antistrophe, and the preceding Strophe, there is one of those plays on the name of the god addressed, which appear inappropriate to us, but were meant earnestly enough by the ancients, accustomed to deal with an original language from which the significancy of proper names had not been rubbed away.—See [note] on Prometheus, v. 85. Besides this, there was naturally a peculiar significancy attached to the names of the gods.—See [note 18], [p. 338], above. In the present passage the first pun is on the name Απόλλων, Apollo, and the verb ἀπόλλυμι, which signifies to destroy) so the Hebrew Abaddon from Abad, he perished.—Apoc. ix. 11), a function of the Sun god familiar enough to the Greek mind, from the description of the pestilence in the opening scene of the Iliad. The second pun is on the title ἀγυιεὺς, leader, or way-god, concerning which see previous note. I have here, as in the case of Helen and Prometheus (v. 85), taken the simple plan of explaining the epithet in the text. The translator who will not do this must either, like Con. and Sym., leave the play on the words altogether imperceptible to the English reader, or, like Sew., be driven to the necessity of inventing a new pun, which may not always be happy English, and is certainly not Greek, thus—
“Apollo! Apollo!
Leader! appaller mine!
Yea! for the second time thou hast with ease
Appalled me, and destroyed me.”
“The blithe blood, that crimson ran
In my veins, runs pale and wan.”
With this Sym. aptly compares a passage from the speech of Theodosius in Massinger’s Emperor of the East—