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Friday, November 17, 2023

Thanksgiving?

Ezra Pound, Instigations (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), p. 228:
I give thanks to Zeus ὅσις ποτ' ἐσὶν, that being an American, I have escaped the British public school.
If Pound had been educated in a British public school, perhaps he would not have mangled the quotation from Aeschylus, Agamemnon 160, so badly:
Ζεύς, ὅστις ποτ᾽ ἐστίν...
He probably misread the stigma ligature (sigma plus tau) in an old edition.