Hear, all-ruling lord of heaven, all-seeing Zeus! Enable the guardians of this land, in might triumphant, to achieve the capture that gives the prize to their hands! So grant thy daughter also, our dread Lady, Pallas Athena! And Apollo, the hunter, and his sister, who follows the dappled, swift-footed deer—fain am I that they should come, a twofold strength, to this land and to her people.
ἰὼ θεῶν πάνταρχε, παντ- 1085
όπτα Ζεῦ, πόροις
γᾶς τᾶσδε δαμούχοις
σθένει ᾽πινικείῳ τὸν εὔ-
αγρον τελειῶσαι λόχον,
σεμνά τε παῖς Παλλὰς Ἀθάνα, 1090
καὶ τὸν ἀγρευτὰν Ἀπόλλω
καὶ κασιγνήταν πυκνοστίκτων ὀπαδὸν
ὠκυπόδων ἐλάφων στέργω διπλᾶς ἀρωγὰς
μολεῖν γᾷ τᾷδε καὶ πολίταις. 1095
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Prayer for Victory
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1085-1095 (tr. R.C. Jebb):