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[295] This line seems at first irreconcilable with 134, where it is said that nine years of Zeus have passed. But it is to be noticed that the word used here is not the usual “περιπλόμενος” or “περιτελλόμενος”, but περιτροπέων, which is not elsewhere applied to the year. The word is to be explained not as the revolving year, but as the year on the turn, i.e. at the very point of changing from one year to another. Secondly, Prellwitz has shewn good reason for supposing that this is the primitive sense of “ἐνιαυτός”, as being the moment at which the heavens are again “ἐνὶ αὐτῶι”, ‘in the same position’; the word represents not a period but an epoch. And in the Gortynian inscr. “ἐνιαυτῶι” actually means ‘at the year's end.’ “περιτροπέων” is in fact to be con nected with “τροπή”, which from Hesiod onwards means the solstice. The sailing from Aulis must have been at the summer solstice; the action of the Iliad is fixed as happening at the summer solstice exactly nine years afterwards. With this time of year, of course, the pestilence sent by Apollo well agrees. So the epoch of the Odyssey is clearly fixed to the winter solstice. Aischylos too, as Verrall has well observed, fixes the date of the Agamemnon to the winter solstice ( Agam. 817 and p. xli. note). Evidently either turn of the year is regarded as the proper moment for a great turn of fortune. Aischylos places the fall of Troy at the (cosmical) ‘setting of the Pleiades’ late in October, four months after the opening of the Iliad.

The Iliad, edited, with apparatus criticus, prolegomena, notes, and appendices. Walter Leaf. London. Macmillan. 1900.

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