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An Additional Note on Thucydides
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
This would be admirably clear and would give excellent sense, but it does entail the deletion of
as an interpolation before 
Marshall is aware that 
is a word that is not likely to be used by an interpolator, but still feels able to propose its deletion and gives a detailed account of the way in which an interpolator might have approached the sentence. When one attempts to read the mind of an ancient scribe, all sorts of possibilities are opened up; in this instance, it seems equally possible that a reader who, as Marshall suggests, was faced with … 
and was not able to understand the sentence because he failed to separate 
from 
and to see that 
was to be taken in the second 
clause, would have been inclined first at least to see whether sense could be obtained by separating 
from 
rather than to conjure up the word 
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1975
References
1 C.R. N.S. xxi (1971), 320–3.
2 And the deletion of 
as an interpolation before 
and the aco ceptance of 
in preference to the manuoscripts, reading 
Both of these proposals seem to me entirely sensible. See my remarks on these readings, Hermes xcv (1967), 378. I Loc. cit. 378–9.
2 I agree with Marshall that 4. 3. 3 suggests animated discussion.
3 Nowhere in Thucydides does the verb 
mean ‘to keep silent’. See M. H. N. von Essen, Index Thucydideus (1887); cf. E.-A. Bétant, Lexicon Thucydideum (reprinted 1961). In view of this, the rendering of 
in 4. 4. 1 as ‘he kept quiet’ in the sense ‘he made no further moves’ is preferable to both Gonune's ‘stopped importuning’ (n. ad loc.) and Marshall's ‘(could not) hold his peace’, as being nearer to the basic meaning of the verb as used by Thucydides, namely ‘to be inactive’. Moreover, ‘he made no further moves’ goes rather better with the 
clause than ‘he stopped importuning’. What part Demosthenes played in the building once it commenced, and whether he approached Eurymedon and Sophocles again, are not made clear, but presumably he did become openly (on this, see my earlier note, 379) active again and did not simply start to importune the generals once more.
4 
strictly means ‘impossibility of sailing’, and not the ‘bad weather’ that makes it impossible to sail. Cf. ii. 85. 6; vi. 22; viii. 99 (instances listed by von Essen).
, here bears its usual meaning in such combinations with abstracts, indicating a yielding under the pressure or influence of something.
1 H. D. Westlake, Individuals in Thucydides (1968), 108.
2 I do not, in any case, believe this. See Westlake, ibid. Also I am not convinced by Marshall that the soldiers were willing to do Demosthenes' will unbidden. There is no evidence that these troops had any special loyalty to him. What is more, he had been out of office since his return from Acarnania (4. 2. 4) and although his victory in Amphilochia had clearly done something to erase from Athenian minds the memory of his defeat in Aetolia (3. 114. 1), so much so that he was given permission to use around the Peloponnese the ships that were destined for Sicily, one does not have the impression that he was enjoying any undue popularity.