κρεμὰς. Robortellus: which Well. might surely have adopted. The description of wild mountain loneliness is here very fine. Let the reader imagine such a region as that of Ben-Macdhui in Aberdeenshire, so well described in Blackwood’s Magazine, August, 1847. ὀιόφρων is more than ὄιος; and I have ventured on a periphrasis. Hermann’s Latin translation given by Pal. is—“saxum praeruptum, capris inaccessum, incommonstrabile, solitudine vastum, propendens, vulturibus habitatum.”
Chorus (in separate voices, and short hurried exclamations). I most cordially agree with Well. in attaching the ten verses 805-15 to what follows, rather than making it stand as an Epode to what precedes. A change of style is distinctly felt at the conclusion of the third Antistrophe; the dim apprehension of approaching harm becomes a distinct perception, and the choral music more turbid, sudden, and exclamatory. This I have indicated by breaking up the general chaunt into individual voices.—See [p. 377], [Note 19].
“Hence to the ships! to the good ships fare ye!”
“What follows is most corrupt, but so made up of short sentences, commands, and exclamations, that if the whole passage were wanting, it would not be much missed. It is very tasteless, and full of turgid phraseology.”—Paley. All this is very true, if we look on the Suppliants as a play written to be read; but, being an opera composed for music, what appears to us tasteless and extravagant, without that stimulating emotional atmosphere, might have been, to the Athenians who heard it, the grand floodtide and tempestuous triumph of the piece. Compare, especially, the passionate Oriental coronach with which “The Persians” concludes. We must never forget that we possess only the skeleton of the sacred opera of the Greeks.
“To find stray goods the world all over, Hermes
Is prince of patrons.”
“Rei furtivae,” as the civil law says, “acterna est auctoritas”; and the Herald, being sent out on a mission to reclaim what was abstracted, requires no credentials but the fact of the heraldship, which he exercises under the patronage of the herald-god Hermes. It may be also, as the commentators suggest—though I recollect no passage to prove it—that Hermes, being a thief himself, and the patron of thieves, was the most apt deity to whose intervention might be referred the recovery of stolen goods. Something of this kind seems implied in the epithet μαστηριῳ, the searcher, here given to Hermes.