Ocheia, Mules, and Animal Husbandry in a Prometheus Play: Amending LSJ and Unemending Aeschylus fr. 189a R

(Fr. 189a R)

Bestowing—of horses and donkeys—the vehicles and the race of bulls as slaves and receivers of burdens.

Out of context, these two verses give the deceptive impression of being obvious and transparent, but their meaning has proved far more troublesome than appears at first. Some readers familiar with the lines already may have balked at this translation even if it is, in principle, warranted by the standard scholarly edition of the fragments of Aeschylus.¹ It is, in fact, the burden of this article to show that not only is this translation incorrect, but so is the emended text on which it rests.

Fortunately, for purposes of our comparison, these lines are quoted in three ancient literary sources, two by Plutarch and one by Porphyry, who quotes Plutarch. All three citations attribute this quotation to Aeschylus, but not to any particular play; scholars regard the lines as belonging to Prometheus Unbound.² The interpretation of the fragment is not a simple matter, and the crux is the correct meaning of the word in verse 1. First, is not the universally received reading; second, even the restored is not translated in the same way by all scholars; and third, the misunderstanding of the word apparently motivated Wilamowitz's further emendation of "offspring" to "race" (printed by Radt above). At stake, once is established as the best reading, are the lexical meaning of , the right understanding of the fragment as a whole, and the poet's precise idea in the intertextual way that he expressed it through an overt and thoroughly integrated allusion to Prometheus Bound. To understand the fragment apart from its lost dramatic context requires patience and a broad argument that touches on popular lore and the nitty-gritty of animal husbandry in antiquity, in addition to literary and linguistic matters.

All three ancient citations come directly or indirectly from Plutarch, and all from passages treating different aspects of a single problem, namely, the right of humans to animal labor:

1. a. Plu. de Fort. 3 (98c) with ,³

2. b. Plu. de Soll. An. 7 (9641) with (quoted below, n. 25),⁴ and

3. c. Porph. Abst. 3.18.6 (= Plu. fr. 193.33-38 S) with (quoted below, p. 78).⁵

The correct reading is easy to establish. "mounting, mating" violates the iambic trimeter by making the alpha long where a short syllable is required in the second foot of the second metron; it can be emended right away to in [b] and [c], based on the reading in [a], but this is only a first step. More problematic is the fact that also has been rendered in four distinctly different ways as coitus ("copulations, mountings"), vectiones ("vehicles, wagons"), "stallions," and "offspring," and my purpose is to decide which meaning is correct. Radt's concern about translating perhaps explains why he followed Wilamowitz 74-75 and emended to where Nauck and Mette print the reading of the codices, . Wilamowitz's conjecture is only incidental to the present argument but, as will be shown, this emendation simply is not necessary.

I. "Coitus"

Not much space need be given to this particular rendering of the word. In 1663, Thomas Stanley (643 col. 2) tried to save the sense of as "mounting, mating" by translating with the plural coitus, now echoed by Clark (2000: 90-91), "matings. " But it is hard to deduce this meaning from the neuter plural , and Stanley's idea was rejected a century later, in 1762, by Benjamin Heath (161 col. 1), who said, "...de coitu hic nequaquam agi constat ex versu sequente." This dismissal is abrupt but just. The same kind of arguments against taking "stallions" as tell against this translation too. In brief, the matings themselves can be neither "the receivers/inheritors of [human] labors" nor "like slaves" (). Of course, Stanley may have intended coitus figuratively (as Clark takes "matings"), the act of mounting standing for its results, that is, the mature offspring in this case...