Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/481

On a Passage of the Philoctetes of Sophocles. 47I able to transfer it to a band for the eyes. At the same time usage is always capricious in things of this sort : and the gloss in Hesychius, unless yXi^m^ has been repeated by accident, seems to imply that aiyXtj was used in the Tereus of Sophocles for a bracelet, while Epicharmus gave the same name to a band for the leg. It is enough to know that the general meaning of aiyXrj is established by express testimony on the authority of Sophocles. The explanation we have given of aiyXtj affects that of the epithet evayj^. For when we have Sleep set before us in a personal shape and attitude, laying his band over the eyes of the suflFerer, and according to the wish of the chorus keeping it fixed there, we cannot let the epithet evai]^ retain the general signification of eJ/xei/i^?, benevolent, which is given to it in the Scholia, and has only been adopted for want of a better. Its proper sense, evjri^ov^^ evrjvejuo^, leniter spirans^ will now involuntarily remind us of winged Sleep, VirgiPs volucris Somnus. In representations of Sleep which exhibit him as he is here conceived, as the dispenser of slumber, we find wings, of the butterfly or the eagle on his shoulders, and his temples are sometimes fledged as well as his shoulders, and sometimes they alone. Zoega, who in his Bassirilievi Tav. QS has treated the various con- ceptions of sleep with a diligence that nothing escapes, and at the same time with the most luminous discrimination, and in the most pleasing order, adduces the works of this class at p. 207 — 210. He is inclined to consider what have been taken for butterfly's wings as those of the bat, and hence to refer them to night : I should rather believe that they contain an allusion to the ordinary conception of Psyche, and intimate that the soul continues to stir even in sleep. Elsewhere, in a dissertation not yet printed on the winged deities (in answer to Winkelman), Zoega explains the wings of Sleep generally, like those of Night, from the pro- perty of covering and concealing. Goethe, in his Iphigenia, attributes shadowing wings to the dim state of uncer- tainty : ' Those of the eagle probably refer to the universal dominion of Sleep, who is -TravdafidTwp, and therefore has Tlao-iOea for his consort. Vol. II. No. 5. 3