[Footnote A:  Choregon.]
    [Footnote B:  Choreuton.]

II.  There is another more egregious Error still subsisting in this instructive Fragment, which has likewise escaped the Notice of the Learned.  The Author is saying, that, in the old Comedy, the Masks were made so nearly to resemble the Persons to be satirized, that before the Actor spoke a Word, it was known whom he was to personate.  But, in the New Comedy, when Athens was conquered by the Macedonians, and the Poets were fearful lest their Masks should be construed to resemble any of their New Governors, they formed them so preposterously as only to move Laughter; +horomen goun+ (says He) +tas ophrys en tois prosopois tes Menandrou komodias hopoias echei, kai hopos exestrammenon to SOMA. kai oude kata anthropon physin+.  “We see therefore what strange Eyebrows there are to the Masks used in_ Menander_’s Comedies; and how the Body is distorted, and unlike any human Creature alive.”  But the Author, ’tis evident, is speaking abstractedly of Masks; and what Reference has the Distortion of the Body to the Look of a Visor?  I am satisfied, Platonius wrote; +kai hopos exestrammenon to OMMA+, i.e. “and how the Eyes were goggled and distorted.”  This is to the Purpose of his Subject:  and Jul.  Pollux, in describing the Comic Masques, speaks of some that had +STREBLON to OMMA+:  Others, that were +DIASTROPHOI ten OPSIN+.  PERVERSIS oculis, as Cicero calls them, speaking of Roscius.

    [Sidenote:  Camerarius and Keuster, mistaken.]

III. Suidas, in the short Account that he has given us of Sophocles, tells us, that, besides Dramatic Pieces, he wrote Hymns and Elegies; +kai logon katalogaden peri tou Chorou pros Thespin kai Choirilon agonizomenos+.  This the Learned Camerarius has thus translated:  Scripsit Oratione soluta de Choro_ contra Thespin & Choerilum quempiam._ And Keuster likewise understood, and render’d, the Passage to the same Effect.  He owns, the Place is obscure, and suspected by him.  “For how could Sophocles contend with Thespis and Choerilus, who liv’d long before his Time?” The Scholiast upon [C]_Aristophanes_, however, expresly says, as Keuster might have remember’d, that Sophocles actually did contend with Choerilus.  But that is a Point nothing to the Passage in Question; which means, as I have shewn in another Place, That Sophocles declaimed in Prose, contending to obtain a Chorus for reviving some Pieces of Thespis and Choerilus.  Is This contending against Them, as rival Poets?

    [Footnote C:  In Ranis, v. 73.]

    [Sidenote:  Meursius, and Camerarius mistaken.]