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Book Twelve
211-29 For Pouludamas' speeches of admonition see 61-79^ Hektor's
attitude, 'quite inexplicable after Polydamas' speech in 8off.' (Leaf), reflects
the traditional roles of the two heroes. Heroism is enhanced if the hero
is given the opportunity to act unheroically, and rejects it, even if as here
the rejection has hubristic overtones.
211 del •.. 67ri7rAf)(7(T£is: an allusion to the role of prudent adviser, presumably
traditional, of Pouludamas in the Trojan saga. Pouludamas has no
part in the Iliad before this Book and his previous intervention (61-79) had
been welcome. — dei, with d, is attested also at 23.648 and Od. 15.379. East
Ionic retained the diphthong, aiei.
212 o08e uev o05e is emphatic (not connective as at 10.299); tne m ^
phrase eirei ou5e [JLEV ou8e eoiKe is formular (= Od. 21.319).
213 5f]|iov was probably rendered by Horace when he wrote plebs eris,
Ep. 1.1.59, but is not really intelligible dvTi TOU 8r|u6Tnv. The form is
generally understood as being a spelling for 6f||ivov, i.e. 8f)|jiiov, 'of the
people', with the same orthography as TTOTVO: for TTOTVIOC {Od. 5.215, etc.),
see Chantraine, GHi 170. The apparatus criticus to OCT refers to T. W. Allen's
paper in CR 20 (1906) 5 proposing 8r||jiov(a) from a form 8f||Jicov meaning
'prudent', a bold remedy for a real problem: why should Pouludamas, son
of one of Priam's councillors and eTcdpos of Hektor (18.251), associate
himself with the 8f)|Jios? Hektor is as good as a king and has a king's temper;
accordingly Pouludamas speaks ingratiatingly, 'It is the business of your
humble servant crov Kpaxos de^eiv, but...'; cf. Diomedes to Agamemnon at
9.32. Hektor's response is to threaten his councillor with immediate execution
for cowardice in the face of the enemy (247-50).
213-14 For the phrase pattern OUT' evi (3ouArj | OUTE TTOT' ev TroAeucp cf.
f\ ev deOAco I f)6 Kcri ev TroAeuco, 16.590. The two phrases are brought into the
same verse at 2.202, OUTE TTOT' ev TroAeiicp evocpiOuios OUT' evi (3ouArj.
217—27 Pouludamas is no OeoTTpOTros, cf. 228—9, but Homeric omens do
not usually seem to demand much in the way of arcane knowledge for their
interpretation. The eagle, of course, is the bird of Zeus, as the hawk is of
Apollo (Od. 15.526), and indicates the provenance of the omen, cf. 24.315-
20. Note that Pouludamas' description of the omen embodies an interpretation
absent from the narrator's text: the eagle, he says, was taking prey home
to its young.
218 opvls f]A06 is Aristarchus' correction of the paradosis opvts eTrfjAOe.
Homer has opvls evi ueydpoiai in the paradosis at 24.219, where emendation
to opvTs ev a. would be easy, but opvls at 9.323. The -1- is long in the oblique
cases and should be so in the nominative, but both quantities are found in
later poets.
219 (= 201) is clearly intrusive, an instance of 'concordance interpolation'.
It is omitted by the most important MSS.