CHAPTER XIII
FURTHER EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF AN EARLY IONIAN SETTLEMENT AT OR CLOSE TO TRAPANI
I am often asked how I explain the fact that we find no trace in ancient authors of any tradition to the effect that the Odyssey was written at Drepanum or that the writer was a woman. This difficulty is laid before me as one that is almost fatal. I confess, however, that I find it small in comparison with that of explaining how both these facts should have failed of being long since rediscovered. Neptune indeed did not overwhelm Scheria under Mt. Eryx, but he, or some not less spiteful god, seems to have buried both it and its great poetess under another mountain which I fear may be found even more irremoveable – I mean a huge quasi-geological formation of academic erudition.
The objection is without sufficient foundation in its implied facts; for that the Phæacians were a real people who lived at a place bearing the name of Drepane (which is near enough to Drepanum for all practical purposes),86 has never been lost sight of at all – except by those who find it convenient to lose sight of it. Thucydides (i. 25) tells us that the inhabitants of Corfu were the descendants of the Phæacians, and the rock into which their ship was turned as it was entering the harbour after having escorted Ulysses to Ithaca is still shown at Corfu – as an island 58 feet high with a monastery on the top of it. But the older name of Corfu was Drepane,87 and when the Carthaginians had established themselves at the Sicilian Drepanum, it would be an easy matter for the inhabitants of the Corfu Drepane to claim Phæacian descent, and – as they proceeded to do – to call their island Scheria, in spite of its offering no single point of correspondence with the description given in the Odyssey.
I grant that no explicit tradition exists to the effect that the Odyssey as a whole was written at or in Corfu, but the Phæacian episode is the eye of the poem. I submit, then, that tradition both long has, and still does, by implication connect it with a place of which the earliest known name was to all intents and purposes the same as that of the town where I contend that it was written.
The Athenian writers, Thucydides included, would be biassed in favour of any site which brought Homer, as they ignorantly called the writer of the Odyssey, nearer their own doors. The people, moreover, of Eryx and Segesta, and hence also of Drepanum, were held to be barbarians, and are so called by Thucydides himself (vi. 2); in his eyes it would be little less than sacrilege to hesitate between the Corfu Drepane and the Sicilian Drepanum, did any tradition, however vague, support Corfu. But it is not likely that Thucydides was unaware of the Sicilian claim not only to the Phæacian episode, but to the entire poem, for as late as 430 B.C., only a little before the date of his own work, there were still people on or near Mt. Eryx who present every appearance of having claimed it, as I will almost immediately show.
As for losing sight of its having been written by a woman, the people who could lose sight of the impossibility of its having been written by Homer could lose sight of anything. A people who could not only do this, but who could effectually snuff out those who pointed out their error, were not likely to know more about the difference underlying the two poems than the average English layman does about those between the synoptic gospels and that of St. John.
I will now return to my assertion that in the time of Thucydides there seem to have been not a few who knew of, and shared in, the claim of Drepanum to the authorship of the Odyssey.
The British Museum possesses a unique example of a small bronze coin which is classed with full confidence among those of Eryx and Segesta. It is of the very finest period of the numismatic art, and is dated by the museum authorities as about 430 B.C.
The reader will see that the obverse bears the legend IAKIN, and the reverse a representation of the brooch described by Ulysses (Od. xix. 225-231). A translation of this passage is given on page 80.
The cross line of the A is not visible in the original, but no doubt is felt at the Museum about its having existed.
There seems, however, to be more doubt whether the legend should be IAKIN, or ΓIAKIN – Γ being the older form of Π. Possibly from a desire to be right in either case, the Museum catalogue gives it as IAKIN in the illustration, and ΓIAKIN in the descriptive letterpress. The one reading will do nearly as well as the other for my argument, which only requires that the coin should belong to the Eryx and Segesta group and be dated about 430 B.C. – neither of which points are doubted. I will, however, give the reasons that convince me that IAKIN is the true reading.
Firstly, neither I nor some artist friends of mine whose opinion is infinitely better worth having than my own, can find any traces of a Γ between the lowermost boss and the neck. I am aware that some experts of the highest competence profess to be able to detect such traces, but the artist who figured the coin in the Museum Catalogue evidently could not do so, and the experts do not seem to have had such confidence in their own opinion as to make him alter his drawing.
Secondly, the composition is obviously and intentionally symmetrical. It would be abhorrent to the instincts of the man who could design so exquisite a coin to destroy its balance by crowding a Γ into the place which must be assigned to it if it exists at all.
Thirdly, Piacus, to which town the coin had been ascribed by the dealer from whom the Museum bought it, is mentioned very briefly by Stephanus Byzantinus, but by no other writer, as a Sicilian city, and he expressly states that its citizens were called ΠΙΑΚΗΝΟΙ; so that the coin, if it was one of theirs, should bear the legend ΓΙΑΚΗΝ instead of the alleged ΓIAKIN. Stephanus Byzantinus did not write till about 500 A.D., and in the absence of any statement from him to the effect that Piacus was an old city, it argues some recklessness to conclude that it had existed for at least a thousand years when he mentioned it; there is no evidence from any quarter to support such a conclusion, and a safer one will be that the dealer above referred to, not knowing where the coin came from, and looking for a city in Stephanus Byzantinus, found he could get nothing nearer than Piacus – whereon he saw a Γ as the smallest thing he could do in Πs, into his coin, and sold it to the British Museum probably for a song as compared with the value which it now proves to have. Thus the Museum authorities having got it into part of their notes (for they seem to have got IAKIN into another part) that the legend was ΓΙΑΚΗΝ, have very naturally been led to see more on the coin than those who have no notes will quite bear them out in seeing. But I will add no more. The legend is obviously IAKIN.
This is an abbreviation for ΙΑΚΙΝΩΝ, as ΕΡΥΚΙΝ and ΚΕΝΤΟΡΙΠΙΝ are for ΕΡΥΚΙΝΩΝ and ΚΕΝΤΟΡΙΠΙΝΩ, not to quote further examples. It means that the people who struck it were called ΙΑΚΙΝΕΣ, and though we cannot determine the precise name of their city we may infer with confidence that it was some derivative of ΙΑΚΟΣ, which is given in Liddell and Scott as meaning Ionian. The name may very likely have been ΙΑΞ though I cannot find any authority for the existence of such a town.
I hold, therefore, that as late as B.C. 430 there was near Trapani a town still more or less autonomous, which claimed Ionian descent and which also claimed to be in some special way connected with the Odyssey; for I am assured that nothing would be allowed on a coin except what had an important bearing on the anterior history of those who struck it. Admitting that the reverse of the coin in question must be taken as a reproduction of Ulysses' brooch – and I found no difference of opinion among the numismatists at the Museum on this head – it is hard to see what more apposite means of saying "Odyssey" upon a coin can be suggested than to stamp it with the subject which invites numismatic treatment more than any other in the whole poem. It seems to me, then, that though the theory that there was an Ionian city in the neighbourhood of Eryx which could claim connection with the Odyssey will stand perfectly well without the coin, the coin cannot stand without involving the existence of an Ionian city near Eryx which claimed connection with the Odyssey. Happily, though the coin is unique, there is no question as to its genuineness.
To those, therefore, who ask me for monuments, ruins of buildings, historical documents to support a Sicano-Ionian civilisation near Eryx in times heretofore prehistoric, I reply that as late as 430 B.C. all these things appear to have existed. Letting alone the testimony of Thucydides, surely an Ionian coin is no small historical document in support of an Ionian city. A coin will say more in fewer words and more authoritatively than anything else will. The coin in question cannot belong to an Ionian colony on Mt. Eryx or thereabouts recently established in 430 B.C. We should have heard of such a colony; how inconceivable again is the bringing in of the Odyssey on this supposition. If the city existed at all it can only have done so as a survival of the Phocæan settlement of which Thucydides tells us.
I want no evidence for the survival of such a settlement in later times; it is not incumbent upon me to show whether it survived or no; the abundant, I might almost say super-abundant, coincidences between all both Scherian and Ithacan scenes in the Odyssey, and Trapani with its immediate neighbourhood, is enough to demonstrate the Trapanese origin of the poem. Its pre-Syracusan and pre-Sicelian indications fix it as not later than about 1050 B.C., its dialect, Ionic-Æolian, connects it with the Phocæans above referred to. It does not concern me to show what became of these Phocæans after the Odyssey had been written; what I have said about the coin IAKIN is said more in the interests of the coin than of the Odyssey, which is a more potent and irrefragable proof of its own provenance and date than any coin struck some 600 years later can conceivably be. Still, the coin being there, I use it to answer those who demand some evidence external to the Odyssey itself. When they ask me where are my monuments, I answer that they are within the coin, circumscribed by the small cincture of an inch and a half at most. For a coin is a city in little; he who looks on one beholds a people, an evidence of title, a whole civilisation with its buildings of every kind. Destroy these, but so long as a single one of its coins remains, the city though dead is yet alive, and the fact of its having had buildings that could become ruinous is as palpable as though the ruins themselves had come down to us.
The exact situation of this city Iax, Iacus, or Iace, cannot be determined, but I incline to place it about a mile or a mile and a half East of Trapani at or near a place called Argenteria. This place is said to have yielded silver, but no one believes that it ever did so. It is a quarry and by no means a large one, just at the beginning of the rise to Mt. Eryx. Some say that Argenteria is a corruption of Cetaria and refers to a monster fish that was killed here, though how it got so far from the sea is not apparent; I think it much more likely, however, that it is a corruption of Iacinteria and that Iax, or Iace, was a quasi-autonomous suburb of Drepanum to which the Greek inhabitants were permitted to retire when the Carthaginians took possession of the parts of the town bordering on the harbour.
My friend Signor Sugameli of Trapani, whose zeal in this matter so far outstrips even my own, that I would gladly moderate it if I knew how to do so, assures me that in his younger days he used to employ a stone in building that the mason told him came from a quarry at the foot of Mt. Eryx called Dacinoi or D'Acinoi. This was years before any one thought of bringing Ionians to Trapani. Signor Sugameli suggested that possibly the name might be a corruption of D'Alcinoo – but we may be sure that whatever else Alcinous's name may have been it was not Alcinous. I asked Signor Sugameli to produce the mason, but he could neither find him nor hear of the quarry Dacinoi. Nevertheless I feel sure that he was told what he said he was, and as the quarry cannot have been far from the Argenteria, I think it probable that its name was a corruption of degli Iacinoi.
Whether this is sound or not, I do not doubt that the Iacenses who figure so largely in Sicilian history during the Eleventh Century of our own era are to be connected with the Ionian settlement that produced the Odyssey. The Iacenses were then settled chiefly about forty miles East of Trapani, but the interval of some 1400 years and more between the date of the coin Iakin and the conquest of Sicily by the Normans will leave plenty of time for them to have spread or migrated.
CHAPTER XIV
THAT THE ILIAD WHICH THE WRITER OF THE ODYSSEY KNEW WAS THE SAME AS WHAT WE NOW HAVE
It remains for me to show that the writer of the Odyssey had the Iliad before her to all intents and purposes as we now have it, and to deal with the manner in which the poem grew under her hands.
In my own copies of the Iliad and Odyssey I have underlined all the passages that are common to both poems, giving the references. It is greatly to be wished that one or other of our University presses would furnish us with an Odyssey in which all the Iliadic passages are printed in a slightly different type and with a reference, somewhat in the style of the extracts from Il. I. and XXIV. here given. The passages are to be found at the end of Dunbar's Concordance to the Odyssey, but the marking of them as they occur in the course of the poem will be more instructive. In my translations of the poems (now finished) I have translated identical passages as nearly as possible in identical words. In the Odyssey I propose to print them in another type and give the references to the Iliad. In the translation of the Iliad there is no use in doing this, for no one supposes that Homer took anything from the Odyssey. The publication, however, of these translations must, I fear, be postponed, but I will give in this Chapter as many instances as I think will be sufficient to satisfy the reader that the Iliad of the writer of the Odyssey was our own Iliad.
I will begin by giving two passages from the Iliad, one from Book I., and the other from Book XXIV., the references in all cases being to the Odyssey. These are perhaps fuller of lines adopted by the writer of the Odyssey than any others in the Iliad, though there are some that run them closely. Lines or parts of lines in the smaller type do not occur in the Odyssey.
The first passage that I will call attention to is Iliad i. 455-485, which is as follows: —
I should perhaps tell the reader that the first Book of the Iliad is one of the few which modern criticism allows to remain in the possession of the poet who wrote what Professor Jebb calls the "primary" Iliad.
The second of the two passages above referred to is Iliad XXIV. 621-651, which runs: —
Professor Jebb is disposed to attribute Il. XXIV. to the writer of Il. IX., which he does not ascribe to Homer, and would date circ. B.C. 750-600. I regret that I can go no further with him than that Il. XXIV. and Il. IX. are by the same hand.
It is beyond my scope to point out the slight and perfectly unimportant variations from the Iliad which are found in some of the Odyssean lines to which I have given a reference; they are with hardly an exception such as are occasioned by difference of context. Though unimportant they are not uninteresting, but I must leave them for the reader to examine if he feels inclined to do so.
He will observe that some lines are nearly and some quite common to the two extracts above given, and I should add that not a few other lines are repeated elsewhere in the Iliad, but enough remains that is peculiar to either of the two extracts to convince me that the writer of the Odyssey knew them both. And not only this, but they seem to have risen in her mind as spontaneously, and often no doubt as unconsciously, as passages from the Bible, Prayer-book, and Shakspeare do to ourselves.
If, then, we find the writer so familiar with two such considerable extracts from the first and last Books of the Iliad– for I believe the reader will feel no more doubt than I do, that she knew them, and was borrowing from them – can we avoid thinking it probable that she was acquainted, to say the least of it, with the intermediate Books? Such surely should be the most natural and least strained conclusion to arrive at, but I will proceed to shew that she knew the intermediate Books exceedingly well.
I pass over the way in which Mentor's name is coined from Nestor's (cf. Il. II. 76-77 and Od. ii. 224, 225, and 228), and will go on to the striking case of Ulysses' servant Eurybates. In Od. xix. 218, 219 Penelope has asked Ulysses (who is disguised so that she does not recognise him) for details as to the followers Ulysses had with him on his way to Troy, and Ulysses answers that he had a servant named Eurybates who was hunched in the shoulders (xix. 247). Turning to Il. II. 184 we find that Ulysses had a servant from Ithaca named Eurybates, but he does not seem to have been hunched in the shoulders; on reading further, however, we immediately come to Thersites, "whose shoulders were hunched over his chest" (Il. II. 217, 218). Am I too hasty in concluding that the writer of the Odyssey, wanting an additional detail for Penelope's greater assurance, and not finding one in the Iliad, took the hunchiness off the back of the next man to him and set it on to the back of Eurybates? I do not say that no other hypothesis can be framed in order to support a different conclusion, but I think the one given above will best commend itself to common sense; and the most natural inference from it is that the writer of the Odyssey knew at any rate part of Il. II. much as we have it now.
I often wondered why Menelaus should have been made to return on the self-same day as that on which Orestes was holding the funeral feast of Ægisthus and Clytemnestra; the Greek which tells us that he did so runs: —
αὐτῆμαρ δέ οἱ ἦλθε βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Μενέλαος (Od. iii. 311).
I did not find the explanation till I remembered that in Iliad II. 408, when Agamemnon has been inviting the Achæan chieftains to a banquet, he did not ask Menelaus, for Menelaus came of his own accord: —
αὐτόματος δέ οἱ ἦλθε βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Μενέλαος,
on remembering this I observed that it would be less trouble to make Menelaus come home on the very day of Ægisthus' funeral feast than to alter αὐτόματος in any other way which would leave the rest of the line available. I should be ashamed of the writer of the Odyssey for having done this, unless I believed it to be merely due to unconscious cerebration. That the Odyssean and Iliadic lines are taken the one from the other will approve itself to the instincts of any one who is accustomed to deal with literary questions at all, and it is not conceivable that Menelaus should, in the Iliad, have been made to come uninvited because in the Odyssey he happened to come back on the very day when Orestes was holding Ægisthus' funeral feast; the Iliadic context explains why Menelaus came uninvited – it was because he knew that Agamemnon was too busy to invite him. I infer, therefore, that the writer of the Odyssey again shows herself familiar with a part of Il. II.
I can see no sufficient reason for even questioning that the catalogues of the Achæan and Trojan forces in the second Book of the Iliad were part of the Iliad as it left Homer's hands. They are wanted so as to explain who the people are of whom we are to hear in the body of the poem; their position, is perfectly natural; the Achæan catalogue is prepared in Nestor's speech (II. 360-368); Homer almost tells us that he has had assistance in compiling it, for he invokes the Muse, as he does more than once in later Books, and declares that he knows nothing of his own knowledge, but depends entirely upon what has been told him88; the lines quoted or alluded to in the Odyssey are far too marked to allow of our doubting that the writer knew both catalogues familiarly; I cannot within my limits give them, but would call the reader's attention to Il. II. 488, cf. Od. iv. 240; to the considering Sparta and Lacedæmon as two places (Il. II. 580, 581) which the writer of the Odyssey does (iv. 10), though she has abundantly shown that she knew them to be but one; to Il. II. 600, cf. Od. iii. 386; to the end of line 614, θαλάσσια ἔργα μεμήλειν, cf. Od. v. 67, θαλάσσια ἔργα μέμηλειν; to 670, cf. Od. ii. 12; to 673, 674, cf. Od. xi. 469, 470; to Il. II. 706, αὐτοκασγνητος μεγαθύμον Πρωτεσιλάου, which must surely be parent of the line αὐτοκασιγνήτου ὀλοόφρονος Αἰήταο, Od. X. 137; to Il. II. 707, ὁπλότερος γένεῇ ὁ δ᾿ ἅμα πρότερος καὶ ἀρείων, cf. Od. xix. 184, where the same line occurs; to Il. II. 721, ἀλλ᾿ ὁ μὲν ἐν νήσῳ κεῖτο κρατέρ᾿ ἄλγεα πάσχων, cf. Od. v. 13, where the same line occurs, but with κεῖται instead of κεȋτο to suit the context; cf. also Od. v. 395, where we find πατρός, ὃς ἐν νούσῳ κῆται, κρατέρ᾿ ἄλγεα πάσχων, a line which shows how completely the writer of the Odyssey was saturated with the Iliad; to Il. II. 755, Στυγὸς ὕδατός ἐστιν ἀπορρώξ, cf. Od. x. 514, where the same words end the line; to Il. II. 774, δίσκοισιν τέρποντο καὶ αἰγανέῃσιν ἱέντες, cf. Od. iv. 626, and xvii. 168, where the same line occurs; to Il. II. 776, where the horses of the Myrmidons are spoken of as λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι, cf. Od. ix. 97, where the same words are used for Ulysses' men when with the Lotus-eaters; to Il. II. 873, νήπιος, οὐδέ τί οἱ τό γ' ἐπήρκεσε λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον, cf. Od. iv. 292, ἄλγιον, οὐ γάρ οἵ τι τά γ' ἤρκεσε λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον.
None of the passages above quoted or referred to are to be found anywhere else in the Iliad, so that if from the Iliad at all, they are from the catalogues. But having already shown, as I believe, that the writer of the Odyssey knew lines 76, 77, 78, 184, 216, 217, and 408 of Book II., and accepting the rest of the Book as written by Homer, with or without assistance, I shall not argue further in support of my contention that the whole of Book II. was known to, and occasionally borrowed from, by the writer of the Odyssey.
Perhaps the prettiest example of unconscious cerebration in the Odyssey is to be found in the opening line of Od. iii, which runs ἠέλιος δ' ἀνόρουσε λιπὼν περικαλλέα λίμνην, which is taken from Il. v. 20, Ιδαῖος δ' ἀνόρουσε λιπὼν περικαλλέα δίφρον· One is at a loss to conceive how a writer so apparently facile should drift thus on to an Iliadic line of such different signification except as the result of saturation. It is inconceivable that she should have cast about for a line to say that the sun was rising, and thought that Idæus jumping off his chariot would do. She again has this line in her mind when in Book xxii. 95 she writes Τηλέμαχος δ' ἀπόρουσε λιπὼν δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος.
The same kind of unconscious celebration evidenced by the lines last referred to leads her sometimes to repeat lines of her own in a strange way, without probably being at all aware of it. As for example: —
βασιλῆες…εἰσὶ καὶ ἄλλοι
πολλοὶ ἐν ἀμφιάλῳ Ἰθάκῃ νέοι ἠδὲ παλαιοί,
(i. 394, 395).
This passage in the following Book becomes: —
εἰσὶ δὲ νῆες πολλαὶ ἐν ἀμφιάλῳ Ἰθάκῃ νέαι ἠδὲ παλαιαί·
(ii. 292, 293).
Another similar case is that of the famous line about Sisyphus' stone bounding down hill in a string of dactyls, Od. xi. 598, it runs: —
αὖτις ἔπειτα πέδονδε κυλίνδετο λᾶας ἀναιδής.
"The cruel stone came bounding down again on to the plain." I believe this to be nothing but an unconscious adaptation from the one dactylic line that I can remember in the Iliad, I mean: —
ἀμφοτέρω δὲ τένοντε καὶ ἴστέα λᾶας ἀναιδὴς
ἄχρις ἀπηλοίησεν.
Il. IV 521, 522.
"The cruel stone shattered the bones of the neck, tendons and all." Granted (which is very doubtful) that there may be an accommodation of sound to sense in the Odyssean line, I contend that the suggestion came from the Iliadic line.
I would gladly go through the whole Iliad calling attention to the use the writer of the Odyssey has made of it, but to do this would require hardly less than a book to itself. I will therefore ask the reader to accept my statement that no one Book in the Iliad shows any marked difference from the others as regards the use that has been made of it, and will limit myself to those Books that have been most generally declared to be later additions – I mean Book X. and Book XVIII. – for I consider that I have already sufficiently shown the writer of the Odyssey to have known Books I., XXIV., and the Catalogues in Book II. It may be well, however, to include Book XI. in my examination, for this is one of the most undoubted, and it will be interesting to note that the writer of the Odyssey has both the most doubted and undoubted Books equally at her fingers' ends. I shall only call attention to passages that do not occur more than once in the Iliad, and will omit the very numerous ones that may be considered as common form.
In Il. X. 141, 142 we find: —
τίφθ' οὔτω;…
Νύκτα δι' ἀμβροσίην, and in Od. ix. 403, 404.
τίπτε τόσον…
Νύκτα δι' ἀμβροσίην.
In Il. X. 142, ὅτι δὴ χρείω τόσον ἴκει; Il. Od. ii. 28, τίνα χρειὼ τόσον ἵκει.
Il. X. 158 begins with the words λὰξ ποδὶ κίνησας. So also does Od. XV. 45.
Il. X. 214 has, ὅσσοι γὰρ νήεσσιν ἐπικρατέουσιν ἄριστοι, this line is found Od. i. 245, xvi. 122, xix. 130, but with νήσοισιν instead of νήεσσιν.
Il. X. 220 ends with ὀτρύνει κραδίη καὶ θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ, so also does Od. xviii. 61.
Il. X. 221 has ἀνδρῶν δυσμενέων δῦναι στράτον ἐγγὺς ἐόντων; cf Od. iv. 246, ἀνδρῶν δυσμενέων κατέδυ πόλιν εὐρυάγυιαν·
Il. X. 243, 244 have, πῶς ἂν ἔπειτ' Ὀδυσῆος ἐγὼ θείοιο λαθοίμην, οὗ περὶ μὲν…
In Od. i. 65, 66 we find the same words only with ὅς instead of οὗ. This is a very convincing case, for the ἔπειτα, which is quite natural in the Iliadic line, is felt to be rather out of place in the Odyssean one, and makes it plain that the Odyssean passage was taken from the Iliadic, not vice versâ.
Il. X. 255 ends with μενοπτόλεμος Θρασυμήδης, so also does Od. iii. 442.
Il. X. 278, 279…ἥ τέ μοι αἰεὶ ἐν πάντεσσι πόνοισι παρίστασαι…
cf. Od. xiii. 300, 301…ἥ τέ τοι αἰεὶ ἐν πάντεσσι πόνοισι παρίσταμαι…
Il. X 292-295, σοὶ δ᾿ αὖ ἐγὼ ῥέξω βοȗν ἦνιν εὐρυμέτωπον
ἀδμήτην, ἣν οὐ πω ὑπὸ ζυγὸν ἤγαγεν ἀνήρ.
τήν τοι ἐγὼ ῥέξω χρυσὸν κέρασιν περιχεύας.
ὧς ἔφαν εὐχόμενοι, τῶν δ᾿ ἔκλυε Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη.
The first three of these four lines is repeated verbatim in Od. iii. 382-384. In Od. 385 the fourth line becomes ὧς ἔφατ᾿ εὐχόμενος τοȗ δ' ἔκλυε Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη.
Il. X. 351…ὅσσον τ' ἐπὶ οὖρα πέλονται ἡμιόνων, cf. Od. viii. 124 ἕσσον τ' ἐν νείῳ οὖρον πέλει ἡμιόνοιιν.
Il. X. 400, τὸν δ' ἐπιμειδήσας προσέφη πολύμητις Ὀδύσσευς, this line occurs Od. xxii. 371.
Il. X. 429 ends with δῖοί τε Πελασγοί, so also does Od. xix. 177.
Il. X. 457, φθεγγομένου δ' ἄρα τοῦ γε κάρη κονίῃσιν ἐμίχθη, this line is found Od. xxii. 329.
Il. X. 534, ψεύσομαι ἦ ἒτυμον ἐρέω κέλεται δέ με θυμός. In Od. iv. 140 this line is found.
Il. X. 556, ῥεῖα θεός γ' ἐθέλων καί κ.τ.λ. Cf. Od. iii. 231.
Il. X. 576 ἔς ῥ ἀσαμίνθους βάντες εὐξέστας λούσαντο. See Od. iv. 48, xvii. 87.
Here, then, are seventeen apparent quotations from Book X., omitting any claim on lines which, though they are found in the Odyssey, are also found in other Books of the Iliad, from which, and not from Book X., it may be alleged that the writer of the Odyssey took them. This makes the writer of the Odyssey to have taken about one line in every 33 of the 579 lines of which Book X. consists. Disciples of Wolf – no two of whom, however, are of the same opinion, so it is hard to say who they are – must either meet my theory that the Odyssey is all written at one place, by one hand, and in the eleventh century B.C., with stronger weapons than during the last six years they have shown any signs of possessing, or they must fall back on some Laputan-manner-of-making-books theory, which they will be able to devise better than I can.
I do not forget that the opponents of the genuineness of Il. X. may contend that the passages above given were taken from the Odyssey, but this contention should not be urged in respect of Book X. more than in respect of the other Books, which are all of them equally replete with passages that are found in the Odyssey, and in the case given above of Il. X. 243, 244 and Od. i. 65, 66, it is not easy to doubt that the Iliadic passage is the original, and the Odyssean the copy.
I will now deal with the undoubted Book XI., omitting as in the case of Book X. all lines that occur in other Books, unless I call special attention to them.
The first two lines of Book XI. are identical with the first two of Book V. of the Odyssey, but Il. XI. 2 occurs also in Il. XIX. 2.
Il. XI. 42, 43, ἵππουριν· δεινὸν δὲ λόφος καθύπερθεν ἔνευεν, εἵλετο δ' ἄλκιμα δοῦρε δύω, κεκορυθμένα χαλκῷ.
These two lines are found Od. xxii. 124, 125, but the first of them occurs three or four times elsewhere in the Iliad.
Il. XI. 181, ἀλλ' ὅτε δὴ τάχ' ἔμελλεν ὑπὸ πτόλιν αἰπύ τε
τεῖχος
ἵξεσθαι τότε δὴ…
cf. Od. iv. 514, 515, ἀλλ' ὅτε δὴ τάχ' ἔμελλεν Μαλείαων ὄρος αἰπύ
ἵξεσθαι τότε δὴ…
Il. xi. 201, προέηκε τεῒν τάδε μυθήσασθαι, cf. Od. iv. 829, where the same words occur.
Il. XI. 253, ἀντικρὺς δὲ δίεδχε φαεκνοῦ δουρὸς ἀκωκή. cf. Od. xix. 453, where the same line occurs but with διῆλθε for δίεσχε.
Il. XI. 531, ὧς ἄρα φωνήσας ἵμασεν καλλίτριχας ἵππους cf. Od. xv. 215, where the same line occurs but with ἔλασεν instead of ἵμασεν.
Il. XI. 624-639. The mess which Hecamedé cooked for Patroclus and Machaon was surely present to the mind of the writer of the Odyssey when she was telling about the mess which Circe cooked for Ulysses' men, Od. X. 234, 235.