previous next

[16] ἔτος ἦλθε. From the sack of Troy to the return of Odysseus ten years elapsed, which were thus made up:—The voyage from Troy to the isle of Circe, the twelvemonth's sojourn there ( Od.10. 467), and the journey thence to the isle of Calypso take up the first two years. The stay with Calypso lasted seven years (7. 259), which leaves one year for the voyage thence and return to Ithaca. The appearance of the suitors at the court of Ithaca coincided with the seventh year (2. 89); the return of Menelaus and the revenge of Orestes upon Aegisthus with the ninth (4. 82; 3. 306).

ἔτος … ἐνιαυτῶν. ἐνιαυτός is the ‘space of a year;’ “ἔτος” is a year as one in a series of years, which make up time or any given period of time. One “ἐνιαυτός” has nothing to distinguish it from another, while it is the essence of “ἔτος” to be first, second, etc., so that no two “ἔτη” are the same. “ἐνιαυτός” is what we express by ‘twelvemonth;’ “ἔτος” is this or that particular year, a natural epoch, while “ἐνιαυτός” is an arithmetical quantity. Thus our passage is parallel to Virgil's “Veniet lustris labentibus aetas” Aen.1. 283 , not to “Triginta magnos volvendis mensibus orbes” ib. 269 . Cp. Aristoph. Ran.347 “χρονίους ἐτῶν παλαιῶν ἐνιαυτούς” . Curtius connects “ϝέτος” and Lat. vetus with the Skt. vatsa-s, ‘a year.’

Homer's Odyssey. W. Walter Merry. James Riddell. D. B. Monro. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1886-1901.

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: