previous next

[343] The sense of this line is clear, you are the first to receive my invitation, but the syntax hopeless. The gen. after verbs of hearing expresses ‘(1) the person from whom sound comes; (2) the person about whom something is heard; (3) the sound heard,’ H. G. § 151 d. δαιτός cannot be brought under any of these heads. “κέκλυτέ μευ μύθων” is clearly different, being a sort of ‘whole and part’ construction. The only possible explanation is, ‘you hear me about a banquet’ (or rather ‘you listen to the banquet from me’), which is without analogy, and only gives the required sense by violence. Moreover καί is meaningless. This, however, is the explanation of Ar., “πρῶτοί μου ἀκούετε περὶ δαιτός”. It may be added that ‘to hear from a person,’ in the sense of receiving a message, is a modern but not a Greek idiom. “ἀκουάζεσθαι”, in the two other passages of Homer where it occurs (Od. 9.7, Od. 13.9), means ‘to listen to,’ as we might suppose from its form, which suggests a frequentative sense. The only remedy seems to lie in Nauck's trenchant conjecture “καλέοντος” for “καὶ δαιτός”, you are the first to listen to me when I am calling to a banquet, but when I call to war you have no ears. A minor difficulty is that Menestheus, who even in this scene is a “κωφὸν πρόσωπον”, never appears among the “γέροντες” (see on 2.53; and for feasts given to them, 4.259 and 2.404 sqq.).

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

The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide References (4 total)
  • Commentary references from this page (4):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: