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Book Nine
horror of drowning (Od. 5.308-12); even so 'abounding in fish' seems a
innocent description of the sea, pace Householder and Nagy, who comment
that 'the original selection of ixOuoeis was probably motivated not by a
striving for fanciful descriptions of the sea, but rather by the implication of
lurking danger' (F. Householder and G. Nagy, Current Trends in Linguistics
9 (1972) 768). Fish eats man in the heroic world, it is true, not vice versa,
but in similes at least (as Aristarchus noted, Arn/A to 16.364) Homer drew
on the world he knew and interpreted his diction accordingly. For fishing
in a simile see 16.406-8 (and n.), 24.80-2, Od. 12.251-4.
5 Boperis: the spondaic scansion (hence (3opp&s in Allen's V group of
MSS) occurs also at 23.195 Boperj KOCI Ze -pp- is unknown in Ionic, cf.
Bop-qs in Hdt., and a consonantalized £ (if such were possible) would not
make position any more than the well attested consonantalized 1. (TUKecci
{Od. 7.116) is a phonetic, not a metrical parallel. Zephuros, cf. 4423ff., is
5u