But upon the fluctuations of the Athenian population there
is much room for speculation. And, quaere, was not the population of
Athens greater two centuries before Demetrius, in the days of Pericles?
[8] Having no Sophocles at hand, I quote from memory, not pretending
therefore to exactness: but the sense is what I state.
[9] _Whose_ version, I do not know. But one unaccountable error was
forced on one's notice. _Thebes_, which, by Milton and by every scholar is
made a monosyllable, is here made a dissyllable. But _Thebez_, the
dissyllable, is a _Syrian_ city. It is true that Causabon deduces from a
Syriac word meaning a case or enclosure (a _theca_), the name of Thebes,
whether Boeotian or Egyptian. It is probable, therefore, that Thebes the
hundred-gated of Upper Egypt, Thebes the seven-gated of Greece, and Thebes
of Syria, had all one origin as regards the name. But this matters not; it
is the _English_ name that we are concerned with.
[10] '_False_:' or rather inaccurate. The burlesque was not on the
Antigone, but on the Medea of Euripides; and very amusing.
[11] But in this instance, perhaps, distance of space, combined with the
unrivalled grandeur of the war, was felt to equiponderate the distance of
time, Susa, the Persian capital, being fourteen hundred miles from Athens.
[12] _[Greek: Sterna th'os agalmatos], her bosom as the bosom of a
statue_; an expression of Euripides, and applied, I think, to Polyxena
at the moment of her sacrifice on the tomb of Achilles, as the bride that
was being married to him at the moment of his death.
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