Author, U: Classical Journal, Vol. 13

Excerpt from The Classical Journal, Vol. 13: For March and June, 1816

With friendly looks, and carollings of love, While Peace sits brooding upon seas and land.

These lines have exercised the ingenuity of commentators; but, fettered by the supposed antiquity of the Poem, they do not seem to have adopted the most natural and obvious solution. The Scholiast atlirms, that by the expression cw'mlpwv my kinsman, Cassandra alludes to Tarpinius a Roman; others have chosen Taxiles or Porus: Woltius conjectures Ptolemy Lagus: Potter, Meursius, and Canter, are silent: Ricard conceives the passage to foretel a treaty which took place between the Roman senate and Ptolemy Philadelphus; and computing the six generations from the'rape bf Helen, (which time, according to his own opinion, em braces a period of nearly nine' hundred years,) gives about a bun idred and fifty to each generation. Nothing, he tells us, can he so probable as that Lycophron should mention a treaty recently con cluded, and by that mention ¿atter his sovereign, and the Romans his allies. To this it may perhaps be answered with some reason, that if, as is apparent, the Poem is a later production, the treaty was not very recent, and was scarcely of suficient importance to have been noticed by a more modern author; and even granting that the Work was' composed in the reign of Ptolemy, it were assuredly a most extraordinary mode of ¿attering a prince to allude to the spoils of which he had been plundered; and commemorate the defeats which he had sustained. Besides, it may be doubted whether Canter Is accurate in his statement of the time which inter vened between Cassandra and Ptolemy; Potter and several other authors are of a dt opinion; and even if we allow his comput ation to be correct, still it is by no means probable that Lycophron would have styled a portion of time, bounded by such indistinct 396 arbitrary limits, by the name of ye'wa, by which term he perhaps night mm a neutron of men calculated at about thirty years; or more probably, if we consider its etymology, a descent in the direct line by blood. When we. Cast our eyes upon the pangs, we perceive imrnediately that the relative can refer to no name but that of Alexander the Great, who is evidently and allowedly pointed out by the term xqmjgaiio; Aim, or Macedonian Lion.

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