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Book Eleven
15.386), liouvcoae (Od. 16.117). The short vowel is characteristic of West
Ionic (Euboean) and Attic, but is usually admitted into the epic only under
metrical necessity.
471 = 17.690 (from uEydAri and with TETUKTCU).
473-84 This picture of a wounded man at bay has no precise parallel in
the Iliad, where the concept of heroic action is mostly focused on the
victorious advance. (Contrast with this the ideal of the fight to the finish
in a narrow place that characterizes Germanic and Old French epic.) The
rescue of the hero, however, is readily modelled on the motif of the recovery
of a corpse: one hero holds off the enemy while his friends drag the body
away. In fact the present scene is a miniature of the action of book 17, the
recovery of Patroklos' body, where Menelaos and Aias again have a principal
role. The situation that preceded Odysseus' wounding reasserts itself,
but the position of Odysseus is represented as more desperate.
474 The resumptive verse after the simile (483) has Tpcoes ETTOV, which,
as Leaf says, almost guarantees the correction of ETTOV6* to ETTOV here. The
active form, dcucpiEirco or aucpemo, 'crowd round', is usual in the epic, but
corrections that assume archaisms (here poos) are often over-corrections, see
Hoekstra, Modifications 54, 63.
474—81 This long and complex simile illustrates the movement of the
action before it and after it (note the repeated BiETpecTcrcxv, 481 and 486).
Odysseus is the wounded deer set upon by jackals who are then dispersed
by the arrival of a lion (Aias). As usual the details are not to be overinterpreted:
Odysseus is retreating but he is not deer-like, nor do the Trojans
inflict any further harm on him, and still less does Aias set about him, see
Moulton, Similes 46, and for similar anticipatory similes 15.271-6^ bT
warn against the generalization of the comparison; Odysseus is not like a
deer in spirit, a point that should be borne in mind when Aias is likened to
a donkey at 558 below.
476-8 The idea that a wound, if not fatal, is not immediately felt echoes
the effect of Agamemnon's wound (264-8). So here Odysseus fights on
despite his injury.
479-81 For the behaviour of this lion in stealing the jackals' prey see on
3.23-7; there is a pair of thievish lions at 13.198-200. Verses 480-1 of the
simile anticipate the action that follows at 483-4.
480 It is hard to attach any appropriate sense to Zenodotus' EV VEUEI
yAoccpupco, but Od. 12.305 has ev AIUEVI yAoctpupco, which appears to mean a
harbour with a narrow entrance and a sheltered interior. For oxiEpco cf.
ocAaos OTTO oxiEpov (Od. 20.278). ATv: 'lion', see 239n. — Saincov: see 9.6oon.
Although a simile is an utterance of the poet himself not a character in the
epic, it is an appeal to the experience of the audience and therefore adopts
the imprecise language (Sodiicov not a named god) of the unprivileged
observer. Some god sends the lion but one can only guess which god.
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