if the Medes had been victorious, we should have been ruined; and now we are supplanted by Thebans in your good opinion, who were before our best friends; and we have been subjected to two dangers, the greatest that can be imagined—then, to that of being Bloomfield, in his last edition, rightly explains αἰσχίστῳ (as Göller had already done) by comparing the words of Ammianus Marcellinus, fame, ignavissimo mortis genere, tabescentes; and observes that to be pined to death was, according to the idea of the ancients, a death, as compared with that of dying with arms in one's hands, especially ignominious, as suggesting the idea of a snared brute beast. Yet he inconsistently retains the part of his original note, in which he objected to Hobbes rendering the word by base, a term to which Hobbes himself doubtless attached the same meaning. Gottleber and Poppo refer ἐσαμένων as well as κτισάντων to θυσίας; and the collocation of the words certainly makes this the most natural mode of explaining them. Bloomfield, however, denies that ἕω is ever used in such a figurative sense, and maintains that it can only refer here to ἱερά. starved to death, if we had not surrendered our city; and now, to that of being tried for our lives.
