[8] Cp. ὀρνίθων ... προκαθιζόντων, Hom. Il. ii. 459-63.
[9] Attention is called to the elaborate word-order by Mr. P. N. Ure in his edition of this portion of Thucydides. The extent to which prepositions can be parted from cases, in post-Homeric as well as in Homeric Greek, is worth notice as a somewhat different illustration of the freedom of Greek order. See, for example, the remarks in Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon on the position of εἰς.
[10] In Caesar B.G. ii. 25 more than a hundred words come between the subject, Caesar and the main verb processit.
[11] e.g. ‘A quarrel had arisen between a big and a little boy about a big and a little coat.’
[12] A good illustration of the freedom of order possible (at any rate theoretically) in Greek, even within the limits of verse, is supplied in a letter from Richard Porson to Andrew Dalzel: “There is a passage of Sophocles three times quoted by Plutarch, and always in a different order, but so as in the three variations to remain a senarian. Now the fragment consists of five words, and the sense is this: ‘(The physicians) wash away bitter bile with bitter drugs [πικροῖς πικρὰν κλύζουσι φαρμάκοις χολήν].’ The five words, you know, will admit of one hundred and twenty permutations, and what is extremely odd, these words will admit twenty transpositions [which Porson proceeds to indicate], and still constitute a trimeter iambic.”—Luard’s Correspondence of Richard Porson pp. 91, 92.
[13] Horace Ars Poetica 40,
cui lecta potenter erit res,
nec facundia deseret hunc nec lucidus ordo.
Can the obscure potenter here be a Latin translation of some such technical term (found by Horace or Neoptolemus in the Greek writers on literary criticism) as δυνατῶς or δεινῶς or πιθανῶς?
[14] Demetrius, for example, evidently expects to find more lucidity in the plain style (the ἰσχνὸς χαρακτήρ) of a Lysias than in the elevated style (μεγαλοπρεπὴς χαρακτήρ) of a Thucydides: see the summary in Demetrius on Style pp. 33, 34. And a principal reason for this is that the former keeps more closely than the latter to the normal order of words in Greek (de Eloc. §§ 191 ff.). For Herodotus as compared with Thucydides cp. de Imit. ii. 3. 1 τῆς σαφηνείας δὲ ἀναμφισβήτως Ἡροδότῳ τὸ κατόρθωμα δέδοται (quoted in the editor’s Dionysius of Halicarnassus: the Three Literary Letters p. 173).
[15] εὐαρίθμητοι γάρ τινές εἰσιν οἷοι πάντα τὰ Θουκυδίδου συμβαλεῖν, καὶ οὐδ’ οὗτοι χωρὶς ἐξηγήσεως γραμματικῆς ἔνια, de Thucyd. c. 51.