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Book Eleven
have been banished from the battlefield, and he is obliged to have Hektor
withdraw unhindered after being stunned and only then collapse, while
Diomedes instead of attacking with the sword is made to give Hektor respite
(an unparalleled detail) by retrieving his spear, and then to abuse him for
his (Hektor's) good fortune. Diomedes is made to avoid Hektor at 5.596-
606 and encounters him only here. The poet has a problem in constructing
narratives of great battles in which the protagonists cannot meet, or cannot
meet decisively, because their roles are determined by the tradition of the
Trojan story. So the duels of books 3 and 7 must be aborted, Hektor must
not meet Agamemnon and must escape from Diomedes here and from
Aias (i4.4oo,ff.), and Aineias from Diomedes (5.31 iff.) and from Akhilleus
(2O.7gff.). As one of these rare encounters the fight of Hektor and Diomedes
attracted the interest of vase-painters, see Friis Johansen, Iliad in Early Greek
Art 219, 269.
349-50 A formular couplet (7X ).
350 TITUCJKOUSVOS K89aA # n9iv: -91 in Mycenaean Greek is mainly an instrumental
plural ending in the declension of a- and consonant-stem nouns,
but its loss as a regular case-form from the later dialects has permitted its
metrically convenient spread within the Kunstsprache to the singular and to
genitival and locatival usages. Since the epic can express 'place at which'
both by the locatival dative and by the locatival (partitive) genitive it is
often unclear what is the grammatical equivalence of -91. TITUCTKOUOCI, of
course, normally construes with the genitive. G. P. Shipp's excellent study
of Homeric -91, Studies in the Language of Homer, 1st edn (Cambridge 1953)
1-17, did not have the benefit of the Mycenaean decipherment and his
inference from Homeric usage that the termination was primarily a singular
and appropriate to consonant stems must be corrected, see his Essays in
Mycenaean and Homeric Greek (Melbourne 1961) 29-41. x a ^ K 6