οἰκτραὶ γάρ: ‘(I ask this,) for they deserve pity, unless their present plight deceives me,’—i.e., unless it excites greater pity than I should feel if I knew more. ξυμφοραὶ is much better than the v.l. ξυμφορᾷ, which would easily arise from a wish to have the same subject in both clauses. When a common word for fraud, such as “κλέπτειν”, is used in the figurative sense, ‘to produce an illusion,’ it is evidently fitter that the subject to the verb should not be a human being. Cp. Ant.681“εἰ μὴ τῷ χρόνῳ κεκλέμμεθα”: ib. 1218 “θεοῖσι κλέπτομαι”.
This text is part of:
Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, with critical notes, commentary, and translation in English prose. Part V: The Trachiniae. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1902.
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.