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BOOK TEN
In the scholia to book 10 two other versions of the Rhesos story are reported.
First, a version attributed to Pindar (Arn/A and bT at 435) in which Rhesos
comes to Troy, performs heroic deeds that so alarm Here that she sends
Athene to despatch Diomedes and Odysseus by night to kill Rhesos as he
sleeps. Second (Arn/A at 435), some said that an oracle had declared
that if Rhesos and his horses once drank the water of Skamandros they
would be invincible; accordingly he was killed by the two heroes the night
he arrived before Troy. This second version was also known to Virgil (Aen.
1.472-3) and to Servius.
Rhesos' entry into the battle, the absence of Dolon, and the role of Here
and Athene, point to versions of the story radically different until the denouement
from that told in this Book. The Pindaric version is clearly
an allomorph of the stories of Penthesileia, Memnon, and Eurupulus: a late
arrival at Troy, an aristeia, and death. Those stories became a canonical
part of the tale of Troy, that of Rhesos did not. The oracle version is
basically a story of a conditional fate: if Rhesos drinks from Skamandros
he will be victorious, just as Odysseus will be safe once he reaches the
Phaeacians (Od. 5.288-9).
As to what version the poet of book 1 o had before his mind, beyond the
fact that Rhesos was slain by night by Diomedes and Odysseus, it is here
unnecessary to speculate (see Fenik, Iliad X and the Rhesus). Some version
he had, and that version he adapted for its present place in the Iliad,
For although since antiquity opinion has been virtually universal among
Homerists that the Book does not form part of the design of the Iliad
(Shewan and van Leeuwen are the principal exceptions), the Book is not an
Einzellied. Cf. Von der Miihll, Hypomnema 182-3.
However, to insert a substantial episode into a poem such as the Iliad is
more difficult than some critics of the analytical school have assumed. The
poet of the Iliad brought to the construction of his poem something of the
outlook as well as the skills of his traditional art. In working out his design
he began each episode as he began the poem itself 'from a certain point',
presupposing what went before. He then proceeded to spin his tale in linear
fashion. His mind was always directed forwards towards his next narrative
goal. (That is why, unless it is germane to the episode he is telling, he does
not expressly refer back to what has gone before.) Now to expand a paratactically
constructed epic, such as the Cypria or the Little Iliad seem to have