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Inscriptions

“Hieronymus of Rhodes, too, declares in his Historical Notes that Sophocles was once robbed of his cloak in equivocal circumstances by a boy who left him his, and when the story, as was only to be expected, went the round, Euripides heard what had happened and made mock of it, saying that in like circumstances he had suffered no loss himself, whereas Sophocles was clearly despised for a profligate. When Sophocles heard this he wrote the following epigram upon him, in which he employs the Fable of the Sun and the Northwind as an allegory of his victim's dissolute character:

It was the Sun that stripped me,1 Euripides; but when you were after a girl your bedfellow was the Northwind; you must be a fool to hale Love into court for highway robbery when you sow another's field.

CURFRAG.tlg-0011.4
” Athenaeus Doctors at Dinner
“This inscription （or epigram） is admittedly the work of Sophocles:

At the age of five-and-fifty Sophocles made a song for Herodotus....2

CURFRAG.tlg-0011.5
” Plutarch （Should Old Men Govern?）

1 cf. Avian Fab. 4

2 if the 55 really belongs to S. the lost remainder of the line prob. contained the age of H., and since the historian would be about 40 when S. was 55 Bergk completes it with ‘at the age of twice-twenty years’ and Gomperz with ‘at the age of six-times-seven years’; but as the context （ q.v. ） clearly suggests that 55 is too low an age for S., that numeral may well be corrupt, and since we do not know that the historian is meant, emendation is useless; for Bergk's fr. 6 see L. G. iii p. 224

Elegy and Iambus. with an English Translation by. J. M. Edmonds. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1931. 1.

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