E.C. Marchant, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 3

τάδε—the conduct deprecated in the last c., which conduct is now summarized in οὔτε . . οὔτε.

οἴκτῳ σώφρονι λαβόντας—‘regarding (the case) with prudent compassion.’ The point of σώφρονι is given in ἀλλ᾽ . . ξυμπέσοι. The obj. of λαμβάνειν in this sense is omitted also in VI. 61.

ὡς . . ξυμπέσοι—the subj. of ξυμπέσοι—τὸ τῆς ξ.—is anticipated.

πρέπον—sc. ἐστί.

ὁμοβωμίους; not found elsewhere; ‘having the same altars’ may mean either ‘worshipped at the same altar,’ of several gods worshipped together, or ‘having like altars’ throughout Greece; hardly ‘whose altars are common to all worshippers.’ The second suits the context best.

θ᾽—this is a necessary addition, as the passage cannot make a fresh start at προφερόμενοι.

μὴ ἀμνημονεῖν—Cobet pronounced these words spurious: the only constr. they can fairly bear is with προφερόμενοι ὅρκους, but, as ἡμεῖς is the subj. of the other infins., this is awkward. (ὤμοσαν would require fut. or aor. infin.: order and the addition of τῶν π. τάφων are against ἱκέται γιγνόμεθα.) τῶν π. τάφων is rendcred ‘by . . tombs,’ but the gen. can hardly be so understood with ἱκέται, on which it directly depends.

ὑμῶν—emphatic.

τοῖς ἐχθίστοις—sc. to your dead (not to us). “The dead are implored to prevent the Pl., their best friends, being surrendered to the Theb., their worst enemies” (Widmann). ᾗ . . ἐν τῇδε—ἐν should not be made to apply to ᾗ, as this kind of idiom (Aesch. Sept. 1032 μητρὸς ταλαίνης κἀπὸ δυστήνου πατρός) is confined to poetry (Wilamowitz on Eur. HF. 237).

πράξαντες . . κινδυνεύομεν—a compressed form of ἐπράξαμεν, νῦν δέ κτλ. For νῦν we might have expected the εἶτα of inconsistency.

ὅπερ δέ—the rel. clause qualifies παυόμενοι, for which we might have had ποιοῦντες.

λόγου τελευτᾶν—epexegetic of ὅπερ. The gen. with τελευτᾶν again in c. 104. If you ‘begin’ with a gen., you may naturally ‘end’ with one.

μετ᾽ αὐτοῦ—viz. τοῦ τελευτᾶν.

ἐς τὰ αὐτὰ καταστήσαντας—i.e. as we were before we capitulated.

τὸν ξυντυχόντα—‘any that comes’; cf. ό τυχών.

ἱκέται ὄντες—‘as suppliants.’ The likeness of this peroration to the poignant appeals in Euripides should be noticed.