This method of speaking is quite in keeping with ancient ideas on the nature of the connection ’twixt mind and body, as Schoe. has proved from Galen (Kühn. Med. gr. V. 301). As to the sentiment which follows, Stan. has quoted—“Quum ergo est somno sevocatus animus a societate et a contagione corporis, tum meminit praeteritorum, praesentia cernit, futura providet”—Cic. Divinat. I. 30. According to Aelian (var. hist. III. 11). the Peripatetics held the same opinion.
“Once Clytemnestra famous, now a dream.”
There is another translation of this passage—the old one in Stan.—
“In somno enim vos nunc Clytemnestra voco,”
to which Pot., E. P. Oxon., and Mül. adhere; but I cannot help thinking with Hermann (Opusc. VI. p. ii. 30), that it is rather flat (matt) when compared with the other. Which of the two the poet meant cannot perhaps be settled now, as the meaning might depend on the rhetorical accent which the player was taught to give by the poet; but I am certain that the version in the text, sanctioned as it is by Wakefield, Schütz, Herm., Lin., and Pal. does not deserve to be stigmatised (in E. P.’s language) as “fanciful nonsense.” When Clytemnestra calls herself “a dream,” she uses the same sort of language which Achilles does to Ulysses regarding his own unsubstantial state as a Shade.—Odys. XI.
“. . . and seeks
For help from those that are no friends to me.”
I have thought it better to retain the old and most obvious interpretation of this passage; not seeing any proof that προσίκτορες can be used in this general way as applied to the gods who are supplicated, without being affixed as an epithet to some special god; as when we say Ζεὺς ἀφίκτωρ (Suppl. I.)