Laudator Temporis Acti

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1018-1021 (tr. Eduard Fraenkel):

But a man's dark blood, once fallen aforetime in death on the earth — who by incantation can call it up again?

τὸ δ' ἐπὶ γᾶν πεσὸν ἅπαξ
θανάσιμον πρόπαρ ἀνδρὸς
μέλαν αἷμα τίς ἂν
πάλιν ἀγκαλέσαιτ' ἐπαείδων;

Fraenkel on πρόπαρ (line 1019):

Curious explanations have been put forward. Paley: 'at a man's feet'; Wecklein: 'the blood pouring from the breast flows to the ground in front of the man': Plüss: 'πρόπαρ ἀνδρός "he who was before a real living man".' Headlam, however, is probably right: 'But human blood once fallen aforetime'; i.e. πρόπαρ is adverbial as it is in the only other passage in which it occurs in Aeschylus, Suppl. 791 πρόπαρ θανούσας δ᾽ Ἀίδας ἀνάσσοι. There too πρόπαρ is clearly temporal (cf. the immediately preceding θέλοιμι δ᾽ ἂν μορσίμου βρόχου τυχεῖν ... πρὶν κτλ.), but at the same time the meaning 'prius' passes into 'potius', as it does so often: 'before it comes to that, sooner, rather'. In Ag. 1019 the temporal sense seems to be stressed. 'When blood has once been shed previously', then there is no escape afterwards, never in all the rest of time.

Fraenkel on ἐπαείδων (line 1021):

as the flow of blood can be stopped, in the case of a wounded man who still lives, by ἐπαοιδή (Blomfield refers to τ 457 f. ἐπαοιδῆι δ' αἷμα κελαινὸν ἔσχεθον and the scholia on it); cf. in the parallel passage (see above on 1018 ff.) Eum. 649 ἐπωιδάς. The verb ἀνακαλεῖν (or ἀνακαλεῖσθαι) was, as early as Aeschylus (Pers. 621), used to denote the calling up of the spirit of a dead person by means of magic and particularly by incantation. Aeschylus uses the same verb here, where it is a case not of a spirit being summoned but of a dead man being brought back to complete physical existence.