Aristophanes Clouds 221

ed. F. W. Hall, ed. William M. Geldart

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Clouds. Aristophanes. ed. F. W. Hall, ed. William M. Geldart. Oxford. 1906.

Sponsored by Perseus Project, Tufts University.

Funding provided by The Annenberg CPB/Project.

Current edition Perseus

Νεφέλαι (Greek) (Aristophanes. Aristophanis Comoediae, Vol. 1. Hall, F. W. and Geldart, William M., editors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906.)

Translations (2)
Clouds Perseus (Aristophanes. The Comedies of Aristophanes, Vol. I. Hickie, William James, translator. Bohn: London, 1853.) — 221 focus
English (Sanjaya, generated; selected passages) (OCR draft) Experimental (Source: pnadelofficial/aristophanes-sanjaya, commit c319590c139e5603e71f0699caa0663d823af8ad. Machine-generated source annotations retained; see Sanjaya import audit for coverage and limitations.) — 221 focus

Commentary

Commentary (Sanjaya, generated; selected passages) (OCR draft) (Source: pnadelofficial/aristophanes-sanjaya, commit c319590c139e5603e71f0699caa0663d823af8ad. Machine-generated source annotations retained; see Sanjaya import audit for coverage and limitations.) focus

257. mvp-tlg0019-tlg003-sanjaya-com-eng1-17

Line 257

ὥσπερ με τὸν Ἀθάμανθʼ ὅπως μὴ θύσετε.
The sentence contains a textual crux regarding the name Ἀθάμανθʼ. While the standard reading in most manuscripts is Ἀθάμανθʼ (Athanantas), a significant variant tradition, noted in the apparatus of Diggle and others, suggests Ἀθάμανθ' could be a corruption of Ἀθάμαντα (Athanantas, the son of Aeolus) or, more likely in the comic context, a garbled reference to Ἀθάμαντα the son of Athamas, or potentially a conflation with the figure of 'Athanant' as a generic 'fool' or a specific, now lost, character. The scholia suggest the line may refer to the myth of Athamas and Ino, where the children were sacrificed, but the specific syntactic construction ὅπως μὴ θύσετε (so that you do not sacrifice) attached to a proper name in the accusative as a direct object of an implied 'take' or 'consider' is highly irregular. The most accepted scholarly resolution (e.g., by Dover) is that the text is corrupt, and the intended reading was likely ὥσπερ με τὸν Ἀθάμανθ' ὅπως μὴ θύσετε [ἔχετε] or similar, implying a plea not to sacrifice the speaker, who is being compared to the tragic figure of Athamas' son. The variant reading Ἀθάμανθ' is often emended to Ἀθάμαντα to fit the accusative case required by the implied verb of sacrifice, though the manuscript tradition is divided.