Down to the present century the Niobe of Aeschylus was represented by eight significant manuscript fragments containing some twenty-three lines. Even in this condition it deservedly attracted the interest and attention of scholars; and in 1933 this interest was intensified by the publication in Florence by Vitelli and Norsa of a mutilated papyrus of twenty-one lines embodying two of the earlier fragments.
Are we to restore ‘sit on eggs’ after Hesychius or ‘cry ’, ‘lament’ after Nauck? In his recent supplement to the Loeb Aeschylus, Mr. Lloyd-Jones says that the latter ‘is far better suited to the context’, by which I am given to understand that he means that Aeschylus would have been very unlikely to employ the brooding metaphor in this passage. Admonished by Wilamowitz that ‘es unverzeihlich ist, das Bild der briitenden Henne zu vertreiben’, I fall back in some bewilderment (...) on the fact that I personally like it very much and that the tomb-nest symbolism, though not absolutely presupposed by Cho. 247 ff. and 501(), would certainly have encouraged the poet to write these later passages. But there is a dearth of objective argument on this matter which I want, if possible, to supply. (shrink)
Down to the present century the Niobe of Aeschylus was represented by eight significant manuscript fragments containing some twenty-three lines. Even in this condition it deservedly attracted the interest and attention of scholars; and in 1933 this interest was intensified by the publication in Florence by Vitelli and Norsa of a mutilated papyrus of twenty-one lines embodying two of the earlier fragments.
Commentators from the Old Scholiast onward extract from these two clauses the one meaning that the pedagogue will not be recognized. They complain that a man's hair going white does not suffice to disguise him, and offer some unconvincing reinterpretations and emendations of The change of mood and tense is also odd; at O.C. 450 ff. which Jebb quotes in support, there is a change of meaning and intensity to justify it.
