This text is part of:
ὑπεξῆλθε ‘had come out, giving way to them (ὑπο-).’ Cf. ὑπεκστῆναι etc. οἱ δὲ τετρακόσιοι. δὲ in apodosis is common in Thucydides. The nearest parallel to the present place is iii. 98, μέχρι μὲν οὖν οἱ τοξόται εἶχόν τε τὰ βέλη αὐτοῖς καὶ οἷοί τε ἦσαν χρῆσθαι, οἱ δὲ ἀντεῖχον. πρυτάνεις ἀπεκλήρωσαν They proceeded in the constitutional way so far. In the regular βουλή the ten tribes took the πρυτανεία in turn, and lots were cast for the order. Of the fifty πρυτάνεις for thirty-five days, there were five bodies of ten πρόεδροι for seven days each, and of these there was an ἐπιστάτης for each day. The casting of lots for πρυτάνεις here in all probability includes the subdivisions πρόεδροι, ἐπιστάτης. πρυτάνεις is the general term. ὅσα πρὸς τοὺς θεοὺς Cf. c. 92, § 9, ὅσον καὶ ἀπὸ βοῆς ἕνεκα ὠργίζετο τοῖς ὁπλίταις; iv. 48, ὅσα γε κατὰ τὸν πόλεμον τόνδε; vii. 11, ὅσα γε κατὰ γῆν; Dem. 272, ὅσον καθ᾽ ἕνα ἄνδρα. Cf. quantum ad. Either the indicative or the ‘restrictive’ infinitive may be supplied. εὐχαῖς καὶ θυσίαις i.e. they performed the εἰσιτήρια (εἰσηλύσια in Corp. Inscr. 3173) in honour of Zeus Βουλαῖος and Athena Βουλαία. πολὺ μεταλλάξαντες . . διοικήσεως ‘having changed (things) greatly from the democratic system.’ πολὺ is adverbial. Less well ‘having changed a great part of . . .,’ which would rather be πολλὰ. πλὴν frequently = πλὴν ὅτι, e.g. Hdt. vii. 32. τὰ δὲ ἄλλα κ.τ.λ. The τά τε ἄλλα of Classen (followed by P-S) is undesirable. Thucydides began as if he would proceed μεταλλάξαντες . . . κατὰ κράτος ἔνεμον τὴν πόλιν. But after διοικήσεως he inserts a qualification ‘only they did not set about recalling the exiles, because of Alcibiades,’ after which he continues ‘yet in other respects, etc.,’ as if the parenthetic qualification had been a main sentence without πλὴν. That is to say, κατὰ κράτος ἔνεμον τὴν πόλιν would be grammatically sufficient and correct, as also would be τοὺς μὲν φεύγοντας οὐ . . . ἕνεκα, τὰ δὲ ἄλλα κ.τ.λ. Cf. vii. 33, σχεδὸν γάρ τι πᾶσα ἡ Σικελία, πλὴν Ἀκραγαντίνων, (οὗτοι δ᾽ οὐδὲ μεθ᾽ ἑτέρων ἦσαν), οἱ δ᾽ ἄλλοι . . . ἐβοήθουν.
Commentary on Thucydides Book 8. T.G. Tucker. London. MacMillan & Company. 1892.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.