Saturday, July 17, 2021
Your Thoughts and Dreams
Richard Kannicht and Bruno Snell, edd., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Vol. 2: Fragmenta Adespota, rev. ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), p. 53 (Adespota fr. 127, here without the lunate sigmas, followed by apparatus, testimonial and critical, from TrGF; tr. C. Bradford Welles):
In line 6 Welles translates Burges' conjecture ταχύπουν (accusative), rather than the manuscript reading ταχύπους (nominative).
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Your thoughts reach higher than the air;
You dream of wide fields' cultivation,
The homes you plan surpass the homes
That men have known, but you do err,
Guiding your life afar.
But one there is who'll catch the swift,
Who goes a way obscured in gloom,
And sudden, unseen, overtakes
And robs us of our distant hopes—
Death, mortals' source of many woes.
φρονεῖτε νῦν αἰθέρος ὑψηλότερον
καὶ μεγάλων πεδίων ἀρούρας,
φρονεῖθ᾿ ὑπερβαλλόμενοι
†δόμων† δόμους, ἀφροσύνᾳ
πρόσω βιοτὰν τεκμαιρόμενοι. 5
ὁ δ᾿ ἀμφιβάλλει ταχύπους
κέλευθον ἕρπων σκοτίαν,
ἄφνω δ᾿ ἄφαντος προσέβα
μακρὰς ἀφαιρούμενος ἐλ-
πίδας θνατῶν πολύμοχθος Ἅιδας 10
