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Book Ten
addressing the hero. In neither case did the goddess reveal her identity
directly, but she took no precautions to conceal it either. In the present case
Diomedes and Odysseus are alone and there is no plausible disguise the
goddess could assume. As usual Athene's intervention poses a problem for
the understanding of human motivation in the epic. For the poet Athene is
not a fiction, and we must assume that the action he attributes to her is the
sort of thing that he believed happened in the Heroic Age. On the other
hand in a realistic narrative it must be possible to interpret the intervention
of the goddess in realistic terms, e.g. that Diomedes felt he had done a good
night's work and ought to get out while he could. The problem is well
examined by A. Lesky, Sitz* Heidelberger Akad. d. Wiss., Phil.-Hist. Klasse,
(1961) 4. Divine monitions are a limiting case of the tendency of the epic to
externalize the workings of the mind, see 1.193-411. Iliadic gods regularly
are said to take away a man's wits or fill him with courage, but the gods as
source of sudden thoughts, brilliant or silly notions, fits of forge tfulness, etc.,
is a typically Odyssean topos, see vol. iv 3-4.
507-8 fjos 6 TCCOG' opuoave KOCTCX 9peva KOCI KOCTCX duuov is a formula of
transition (4X //., 3X Od.), followed four times by TO9pa 8e. The replacement
of the last colon here by TO9pa 8' 'AOfjvn is unexceptionable but
by drawing back the apodotic 8' entails the modification of the formular
verse 508 - syyuOsv ioTauevn (medial at 15.710 and 17.582) for dyxoO 8 J
iorauevri TTpoaiyr) ... OCT reads fjos as the conjunction wherever metre
permits, here as a correction for icos |i£v of the vulgate: probably a hypercorrection,
since the metathesis rjo > EGO certainly antedates the Iliad, cf.
Hainsworth, Od. 5.123^
512 = 2.182 and (to £uverp