κατασκαφῇ … δῃώσειν πυρί= “"to destroy it with fire, in such a manner as to raze it to the ground"”: πυρί is instrum. dat., and coheres closely with the verb; κατασκαφῇ is dat. of manner, but with proleptic force, like O. T. 51 “ἀλλ᾽ ἀσφαλείᾳ τήνδ᾽ ἀνόρθωσον πόλιν”, =“ὥστε ἀσφαλῆ εἶναι.” Καπανεὺς is the giant in whom the “ὕβρις” of the assailants takes its most daring and impious form, the Goliath or Mezentius of the story: cp. Ant. 133, Aesch. Th. 422 ff. In Ph. 1128 Eur. follows this conception; but in Suppl. 861 ff. he presents Capaneus in a totally new light, as no less modest than trusty. That whole passage of the Supplices,—in which Eur. seeks to individualise some of these champions more closely,—is curious and characteristic.
This text is part of:
Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, with critical notes, commentary, and translation in English prose. Part II: The Oedipus Coloneus. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1899.
Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education provided support for entering this text.
This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
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.