οὐ τἀπὶ Λυδοῖς. Here “ἐπὶ Λυδοῖς”=‘in their country’ (248 “ἐν Λυδοῖς”): cp. 1100 “γῆς ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτοις τόποις”: Her.5. 77“ἐπὶ...τῇ χώρῃ”.—*“ὑπ᾽ Ὀμφάλῃ”: in subjection to her,—a common sense of “ὑπό” with dat. (as Thuc.1. 32“εἰ ἐσόμεθα ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῖς”). ὑπ̓ is an almost certain correction of the MS. ἐπ̓ (see cr. n.), which τἀπὶ may have generated. If ἐπ̓ were retained, it could mean only ‘in the power of’: for, in reference to one person, “ἐπὶ” could not possibly mean merely ‘with.’ After “ἐπὶ Λυδοῖς”, however, the repetition of “ἐπί” in a different sense would here be awkward. πόνων λατρεύματ̓, service consisting in toils (defining gen.): cp. 505 “ἄεθλ᾽ ἀγώνων”. ( O. C.105“μόχθοις λατρεύων”, ‘thrall to woes,’ is not parallel.) ὁ ῥιπτὸς … μόρος: cp. Ant.36“φόνον... δημόλευστον”. A sarcastic allusion to the vivid detail with which Lichas had told the story (270 ff.). Heracles had really killed Iphitus. The denial here refers only to the place which the murder held in the story told by Lichas. Heracles was instigated, not by the Lydian servitude which punished his crime, or by those affronts (262 ff.) which Lichas represented as having moved him to the crime, but, in reality, by the refusal of Eurytus to give him Iolè.
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.