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Book Twelve
(5.524, Od. 5.478, 19.440) or fire (23.177, 23.238 = 24.792) as readily as
the vitality of a human being or animal (horse 23.468, 23.524, mule Od. 7.2,
lion 5.136, 20.172).
20-2 The rivers of the Troad. The Rhesos, Heptaporos, Karesos,
Rhodios, and Grenikos are mentioned only here in the Iliad. That is not
surprising, since together with the Aisepos (which flowed past Zeleia into
the Propontis, 2.824-7) tnev do not flow across the Trojan plain. The
names, however, form some sort of traditional list for they recur (except for
Karesos) in the list of rivers in Hesiod Theog. 338-45, see West's n. ad loc.
Hesiod's list is incoherent and suggested already to Aristarchus that Hesiod
had taken the names from this passage, ou yap e£svf)vox6 TOUS TroTajJous \xr\
ovTas d^ioAoyous ei lit) 61' "Ourjpov (Arn/A); a good point, but by no means
conclusive. It is usually safer in cases such as this to think of the two poets
drawing on similar traditional sources, see for example the commentators
on Od. 8.1676°. There are, however, some indications that the tradition
behind this digression is not that which provides most of the background
to the Iliad, see nn. to 11, 23, 27, and 33. For further discussion see
J. Butterworth in Studies Webster 1 37-9.
20 The jingle 'Pfjcros . •. KdpTjaos, however handy as a mnemonic device,
is uncharacteristic of Homeric/Hesiodic cataloguing style; Hesiod, loc.
cit., avoided it. Heptaporos, 'seven channels' (or 'fords'), is presumably a
Hellenization of an aboriginal name. The Rhesos was unidentified in
classical times, 'unless it be the Rhoeites' (Demetrius of Scepsis, a would-be
expert on the Troad, apud Strabo 13.1.44). Pliny, JV7/5.124, could find no
trace of the Heptaporos, Karesos, and Rhodios either; the former was
identified with the Pidys, the latter with the Dardanos by the exegetic
scholia. For the courses of the Grenikos (Granicus) and Aisepos, which run
well to the east of the Troad, see map 3, vol. 1 251.
21 STos T8 ZK&uavSpos: the peculiar metrics whereby Ix- do not make
position, cf. the treatment of (TKSTrapvov, CTKITI (Hesiod, Erga 589) and
Z&KUVOOS, ZeAeia, have caused much discussion. Some, e.g. Heubeck,
Wiirzburger Jahrbiicher 4 (1950) 201, and Wyatt, ML 183 n. 1, have thought
that the spelling CTK represented, in a non-Greek river-name, a non-Greek
unitary phoneme, but the tradition of the grammarians, e.g. Monro, GH
343, Debrunner, /F45 (1927) 183, and Chantraine, GHi 110, is strongly in
favour of the view that we have a licence motivated by the clash between
the needs of the narrator and the structural requirements of the hexameter.
The whole matter is judiciously examined - and the grammarians supported
- by O. Szemerenyi in Tractata Mycenaea, Proc. of the VHIth International
Colloquium on Mycenaean Studies (1985) 343-7. Suggestions that ZK&|jav8pos
is translated by its alternant EdvOos, or (better) that the two names are
versions of the same word, though attractive, remain unproven. 8Tos is
319