δισσάρχας (found only here): see on 251 “δικρατεῖς.” ὀλέσσας: cp. Ph. 1163“πέλασσον”. (Below, in 927, some edd. read “ἐξανύσσειν”: see n. there.) This epic licence in tragic lyrics is illustrated by their toleration of such forms as “τόσσον” (185), “μέσσος, ζώειν” ( El. 157, O. C. 1213), “πνείειν” ( Ant. 1146), etc. βασιλῆς is the form which the grammarians Draco and Herodian read here (cr. n.). But, so far as Attic inscrr. are available, they indicate that the acc. plur. from “ευ” stems ended in “-έα_ς”, always uncontracted; while the contraction in “-εῖς” (not “-ῆς”) was the rule from the Macedonian age onwards. (The earliest example of “τοὺς βασιλεῖς” quoted by Meisterhans, Gramm. Att. Inschr. § 39, belongs to 318—311 B.C.) We must regard the acc. “βασιλῆς” here, then, not as an old Attic, but as a poetical form. On the other hand, “βασιλῆς” was the form of the nom. plur. in the older Attic (cp. 189). Herodian (l. c., cr. n.) cites “νομῆς” from Xenophon, as if it were an acc. pl. like “βασιλῆς” here: but in the place to which he apparently refers ( I. Cyr. 1§ 2) it is nom., and the best recent edd. give “νομεῖς”. θάνοιμι καὐτός: cp. Aesch. Cho. 438“ἔπειτ᾽ ἐγὼ νοσφίσας ὀλοίμαν”.
This text is part of:
Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, with critical notes, commentary, and translation in English prose. Part VII: The Ajax. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1907.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.