Note 92 — XIV.
Reading edition
To so miserable a strait are some of them reduced that they actually strive to get a living by making these sacred thread poitas and strings for loins, indicating the pinching poverty and repulsive squalor in which they pine away their wretched existence. Indeed not a few of these widows are left "to the cold pity and grudging charity of a frosty world." They might almost sing and sigh with the poet as he sat in deep dejection on the shore.