In his notice of my edition of this play, your reviewer questions the emendation, which Headlam proposed and I adopted, of v. 370 (Τυφῶνα θοῦρον, θεὸς ὅς ἀντέστη θεοῖς for MSS.Τυφῶνα θοῦρον, πᾶσιν ὅς ἀντέστη θεοῖς), and says: ‘Even if we suppose that Typhon could be called a god, yet the word comes awkwardly after the accusative θοῦρον.’The first point was fully dealt with by Headlam himself in C.R. 1900, pp. 106–7, where he notes that Typhon is called a god by Hesiod (Th.824, κρατεροῦ θεοῦ, 871ἐκ θεόφιν γεϝεή and by Hesychius (Τυφωεύς θεός τις γηγενής) and that his divinity is implied by Aeschylus in Theb. 497–501. In the same article he refers to copious examples of the insertion of πᾶσιcontra metrum.
‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin’ not only ‘of little minds,’ but of some classically trained minds as well. And it is surprising to see how this has caused certain unevennesses in ancient authors to be trued up. Aristophanes, for example, we are toldby a late venerable scholar, never permits a change of meter in a single speech directed to the same person; and to get rid of the two deviations from this rule, the framer of it cut down the seemingly good trochaic tetrameters in the Peace(299 sq.) to iambic trimeters, and then put line 555 before line 553 and took the three lines 555, 553, 554 from Trygaeus and assigned them to the coryphaeus. It is conceivable that if we possessed the thirty-three lost comedies of Aristophanes the editor might have had more and harder surgery on his hands.
Bevan's Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus - The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus rendered into English verse by Edwyn Robert Bevan. Pp. xxxix, 90. Sm. 4to. London, David Nutt, 1902. 5s. net.
