εἴθ᾽ ὤφελες: cp. 1131 “ὡς ὤφελον” (n.). The ironical wish is a way of expressing how insane she thinks Electra's present design: ‘It is a pity that thy courage was not shown in preventing, rather than avenging, our father's murder.’ πᾶν γὰρ ἂν κατειργάσω, lit., ‘thou wouldst have achieved anything’; nothing would have been too hard for thee,—even to defeat the murderous conspiracy. The MS. reading, “πάντα γὰρ” “κατειργάσω”, is impossible: “ἂν” could not be omitted here. [Campbell defends that reading by Thuc. 8. 86.§ 4, “ὡρμημένων γὰρ τῶν ἐν Σάμῳ Ἀθηναίων πλεῖν ἐπὶ σφᾶς αὐτούς, ἐν ᾧ σαφέστατα Ἰωνίαν καὶ Ἑλλήσποντον εὐθὺς εἶχον οἱ πολέμιοι, κ.τ.λ.” There, however, (a) “ἐν ᾧ”, ‘in which case,’ serves at once to suggest the conditional sense; and (b） “εἶχον” is an imperf., not an aorist (cp. 914 n.). Stahl, indeed, reads “σαφέστατ᾽ ἂν”, with Dobree: but that does not seem necessary.]
This text is part of:
Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, with critical notes, commentary, and translation in English prose. Part VI: The Electra. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1894.
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.