It’s a rather snarky quote, and apparently Marginalia contained quite a few of them. An Amazon reviewer writes:

this is a lot of fun, it’s been ages since I read it. but he sometimes has nice things to say, often tears apart peoples’ writings and gets into all manner of topics, analysis of plagiarism and it’s morphology among the most memorable…

Here’s the quote:

I can never hear an Italian opera without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy of Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.

My first guess for the word that would be turkeys was lurkers. Meleager was a Greek hero, and the Sophocles tragedy to which Poe is referring is also called Meleager.

I don’t like “Container that’s pig Latin for its type of contents” as a clue for ashtray