Why should thy son with foolish venture
Shake thy sure Empire to its centre?”
Here I may say with Buck., “I have given the best sense I can to the text, but nothing is here certain but the uncertainty of the reading.” For a translator, δι ἄνοιαν, proposed by Blom., is convenient enough.
“Triremes no more?”
ναες ἄναες (α)ναες—A phraseology of which we have found many instances, and of which the Greeks are very fond. So in Homer, before the fight between Ulysses and Irus, one of the spectators foreseeing the discomfiture of the latter, says—
Ἠ τάχα ῏Ιρος (α)Ιρος ἐπίσπαστον κακον ἔξει
ὁιην ἐκ ρακέων ὁ γέρων ἐπιγουνίδα φαινει.
“Irus soon shall be no Irus, crushed by such dire weight of woes,
Self-incurred; beneath his tatters what a thigh the old man shows!”