Note 43 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal

This may be seen especially in the chorus of the Seven against Thebes: ‘Gods of our City, let it not be destroyed with our houses and our hearths.... O ye who have dwelt therein so long, will ye betray this land?’ Six centuries later this may be seen in the ‘Aeneid’, where the preservation of the Trojan City across the seas is plainly due solely to the protection of Juno, and in no wise to any inward notion of Trojan blood giving it an assurance of eternal duration.