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[1249] γοᾶτο Cp. Curt. Verb 1.138, Eng. tr. 92: “It seems to me best on all grounds to suppose that shortly before the rise of the Greek Epic the [syllabic] augment became occasionally exposed to the same tendency towards wearing away (Verwitterung) which the of ἄρα and the of ἔνερθε could not always withstand; that there were, in short, pairs of forms then in use, one with the augment and one without ... The omission of the syllabic augment in Homer was purely a matter of choice ... Post-Homeric poetry adopts the power of dispensing with the syllabic augment as an inheritance from its predecessor, and makes the greater use of it in proportion as it is removed from the language of ordinary life. Hence it is that, as is shown by the careful investigations made by Renner (Stud. 1.2.18 ff.), the omission of the syllabic augment is extremely rare in iambic, and far more common in elegiac and lyric verse. Hence, as is shown (Stud. 1.2.259) by Gerth, in the dialogue of tragedy the range of this license is very limited indeed, while the majority of instances of it occur in the slightly Epic style of the messengers” speeches, or still more commonly in lyric passages. “ The tragic ῥήσεις here borrow from a practice more marked in epic narrative than in epic speeches. In Homer, where augmented and unaugmented forms are on the whole about equally numerous, the proportion of augmented to unaugmented is in the speeches about 10 to 3, in the narrative about 5 to 7: see Monro, Hom. Grammar sect. 69.

διπλοῦς acc. plur., a twofold progeny, viz. (1) Oedipus by Laius ἐξ ἀνδρὸς ἄνδρα), and (2) her four children by Oedipus τέκνα ἐκ τέκνων, where the poetical plur. τέκνων is for symmetry with τέκνα, as 1176 τοὺς τεκόντας = τὸν πατέρα).

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