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[56] With this line at last we seem to be again in the original stream of the oldest part of the poem; it describes the first array of the Trojans for battle after the retirement of Achilles. The phrase θρωσμὸς πεδίοιο thus gains in significance; it means the point where the plain springs or rises to the hills; i.e. the foot of the hill on which Troy is built. This evidently must be the place where the army is set in order for battle. But when “Θ” had been interpolated, and the Trojans were bivouacking “ἄγχι νεῶν”, the sense of the phrase was lost. Hence the still later rhapsodists to whom we owe 10.160 and 20.3 — the only repetitions of the phrase — took it to mean ‘rising ground in the plain,’ somewhere near the camp. But this is not like Homer; where he has to speak of a locality in the plain, he gives it a specific name, ‘the tomb of Ilos,’ ‘the mound called Batieia,’ or at least ‘the oak.’ But here there is nothing whatever to specify the locality unless it be taken to mean ‘the margin of the plain.’ We might as well suppose, if we found such a phrase as “πεδίοιο πείρατα”, that it meant ‘the end of something in the plain.’ Τρῶες, in the course of the long clause following, is left without a verb; we can supply “κόσμηθεν, ὡπλίζοντο”, or the like, from the general sense of the preceding passage. But in all probability this line followed the description of the arming of the Greeks in B (perhaps 2.483); a transitional line such as “ὧς οἱ μὲν παρὰ νηυσὶ κορωνίσι θωρήσσοντο” (20.1) may probably have been supplanted by the new opening 1-55.

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

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