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[*] 320. This is a favourite construction with certain authors, especially Thucydides, who also, on the same principle, prefers the indicative and subjunctive to the optative in ordinary indirect discourse after past tenses (670). The early poets, on the other hand, especially Homer, use it very sparingly.1
1 Weber, p. 243, gives a comparison of the usage of various writers, showing that the proportion of subjunctives to optatives after past tenses in pure final clauses and after verbs of fearing is as follows:—in Homer 35 : 156, Pindar 2 : 10, Aeschylus 2 : 9, Sophocles 2 : 23, Euripides 31 : 65, Aristophanes 13 : 37, Herodotus 86 : 47, Thucydides 168 : 60, Lysias 22 : 19, Isocrates 21 : 17, Isaeus 8: 17, Demosthenes 40 : 40, Aeschines 13 : 7, Plato 22 : 79, Xenophon 45 : 265. In all writers before Aristotle 528 : 894. In the Attic writers and Herodotus, excluding Xenophon, the two are just equal, Isaeus 441.
Macmillan. London, Melbourne, Toronto. 1889. reprint edition:. St. Martin's Press. New York. 1965.
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