bT sch. on E.166

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
1

Dear Homerists: I have a somewhat trifling question on another Iliadic scholion. As Diomedes works havoc among the Trojan ranks during his aristeia, Aeneas goes to find Pandarus (E.166ff.), now rather gloomy (esp. E.212-16) after realizing that he’s failed at the bow yet again. He initially responds to Aeneas with his lengthy, despondent speech about how he left his chariots at home. An exegetical sch. on Ε.166 reads:

(166a) τὸν δ’ ἴδεν Αἰνείας: τὸ ὁμοειδές τε ἐκκλίνει καὶ πρόθυμον
Πάνδαρον ποιεῖ ἀθυμοῦντα ἐπὶ Διομήδει. b(BCE3)T

(E.166-70: Τὸν δ᾽ ἴδεν Αἰνείας ἀλαπάζοντα στίχας ἀνδρῶν,
βῆ δ᾽ ἴμεν ἄν τε μάχην καὶ ἀνὰ κλόνον ἐγχειάων
Πάνδαρον ἀντίθεον διζήμενος εἴ που ἐφεύροι·
εὗρε Λυκάονος υἱὸν ἀμύμονά τε κρατερόν τε,
στῆ δὲ πρόσθ᾽ αὐτοῖο ἔπος τέ μιν ἀντίον ηὔδα·)

I read this as saying that the poet has diverted from the corresponding Pandarus scenes (where he’s consistently shown as eager for glory, boastful, and money-loving according to the commentators) and instead now makes him despondent because of Diomedes. Nünlist, however, says that this scholion indicates that “now Pandarus is energetic and Diomedes despondent.” This is just a mistake, right? Or am I missing something obvious?

2

I haven’t checked but yes it looks like just a slip.
I’m not sure I understand τὸ ὁμοειδές τε ἐκκλίνει. (LSJ’s εκκλινω entry is bad: II.2 is not intransitive). Without investigating I reckon it will mean that he (Homer) shuns uniformity in his representation of Pandarus—he has him veer from προθυμια to αθυμια and back. I don’t think the second part means “he now makes him despondent” as you take it, rather the opposite. προθυμον is predicative: Pand is currently αθυμος after his second non-lethal hit, and Homer (via Aeneas) sets about making him προθυμος.

Do you know the Ptolemaic commentary on bk.5 worked on by Panagiota Sarischouli? It covers this stretch of text IIRC but is heavily if not exclusively Aristarchean and I wouldn’t expect it to have this bT material.

3

I think we are taking the first part (τὸ ὁμοειδές τε ἐκκλίνει) in the same way: Homer avoids uniformity/monotony (in general and specifically with Pandarus). This accords with the frequent praise for Homer’s use of variation/ποικιλία in bT. I’ve run into ἐκκλίνω in the scholia before, but never really thought about it—I’ll look into it.

I like your suggestion for καὶ πρόθυμον Πάνδαρον ποιεῖ ἀθυμοῦντα ἐπὶ Διομήδει. The Poet makes the disheartened Pandarus πρόθυμος again. I think that works. It’s still a bit odd, though, since we haven’t yet seen Pandarus being ἄθυμος (in E.102ff., where we last met him, he’s rather the opposite). So, it’s probably better to think of the scholion as lauding the variation within this scene (the Aeneas-Pandarus sequence), where we see him go from dejected to over-eager, rather than (just) between Pandarus scenes.

Thank you for bringing up the papyrus commentary—and for your work on that difficult text! I had looked at it a while ago, but need to go through the ed. in greater detail. I don’t think there is any overlap with this particular scholion, but there are some interesting connections with the exegetical sch. elsewhere in the same scene.

4

It sounds like both of you are agreed that ἐκκλίνειν simply means “to pervert” (older sense of “alter/distort”) here, being used transitively with τὸ ὁμοειδές as the object, Homer as the subject? So ἐκκλίνω.I in the LSJ?

I think I’ve asked before why the LSJ uses “intr.” in some entries and “abs.” in others. I would have thought that this entry answers that riddle: ἐκκλίνω.II seems to suggest that intransitive usage can allow an indirect object, while absolute usage no objects of any kind.

5

Joel, No it’s εκκλινω II.2 (“avoid, shun”), classed as intrans. when in fact it’s transitive. It takes a direct object (acc.) not an indirect one (dat.).

dikaiop. Yes that’s it. Pandarus, knowing that his hit was not fatal after all (never mind how?), is naturally disheartened—as he promptly explains when Aeneas finds him. I don’t see there’s anything “odd.” And a small query: should one speak of these bT scholia as “laud(ing)” the variation? Isn’t it more analysis or observation than praise?

I see from Erbse that the το ομοειδες εκκλιν. phrase crops up a number of times in the bT scholia, applied to the poet’s ringing the changes on something. The most interesting (or least uninteresting) looks to be the note at Il.9.125, where coupled with το ομοειδες διακοπτει.

The only thing that makes that bk.5 commentary difficult is that it’s so badly damaged—but that’s often the way with papyri! You’ll find Panagiota’s edition rather uneven.

6

MWH: I said it’s a little odd because a reader might reasonably see the real variation in this scene as stemming from the fact that now (after all his προθυμία in Δ and E) Pandarus is disheartened. But that’s not what this (characteristically elliptical) scholion is talking about.

Sure, “analysis” is fine, but I used the language of praise intentionally. When (at least many of) the exeg. scholia are taken together, and not just in isolation, I think the line between “praise” and “analysis” is rather blurry (unlike much of the VMK). After all, Homer is the αρχηγὸς πασης σοφιας.

As for the papyrus commentary on E, the parallels with bT scholia are actually pretty minor (unlike the Aristarchan material). The closest correspondence is with E.249d (ex):

Sthenelus, seeing Aeneas and Pandarus rushing toward them on Aeneas’s chariot, addresses Diomedes:

Ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε δὴ χαζώμεθ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ἵππων, μηδέ μοι οὕτω
θῦνε διὰ προμάχων, μή πως φίλον ἦτορ ὀλέσσῃς. (E.249-50)

A bT-scholion on E.249 clarifies that he’s not urging Diomedes to back down:

χαζώμεθ’ ἐφ’ ἵππων: οὐκ ἀναχωρεῖν αὐτῷ τῆς μάχης παραινεῖ ἐπὶ τῶν ἵππων, ἀλλ’ ἀναβῆναι ἐπὶ τὸ ἅρμα καὶ μὴ πεζὸν πρὸς ἱππέας μάχεσθαι. b(BCE3E4)T

Sarischouli’s ed. has the following for col. ii. 21ff., clearly with some parallel to bT, as she notes:

[…excuse my formatting…]

21 ἀλλ’ ἄγε δὴ χαζώμε̣θ̣’ ἐφ’ ἵππων, [μηδέ μοι οὕτω]
22 θῦν̣ε̣ διὰ προμάχω̣ν, μή πω̣ς̣ [φίλον ἦτορ ὀλέσσηις·]
23 οὐ τὸ τοι̣οῦτο συμβ̣ουλεύει ὁ Σθε̣ν̣[ελος, ἐπὶ τὰ (?) ἅρ-]
24 ματα ἀναβάν̣τ̣α̣ φεύγειν, ἀλλ [±12]
25 μὴ προκ̣ινδυ̣ν̣ε̣ύειν πρὸς τοὺς ε[±12]
26 ὁ πᾶς ὃν α̣ [ ±7 οὐ]κ̣ ἀναχωρεῖν ἐπ[ὶ ±12]

Such a comment could possibly derive from an Aristarchan source as well.

7

On the Il.5 commentary, I agree. I described it as “heavily if not exclusively Aristarchean,” and would not expect to find bT-derived material in it. The reconstruction of ii.21-26 that you quote is actually mine (as are most of the notes), but I’d hope it can be bettered.

A continuous translation of the bT commentary would be a good thing to undertake (and a comprehensive study of it even better), but not at all easy. I believe it’s a unitary product, but naturally we don’t have it quite intact. A project for you, perhaps?

8

I know there’s at least one translation project for the scholia vetera according to Erbse’s ed. I’d be happy to have it of course, but I have questions about its utility at this stage of research on ancient Homeric scholarship. I’ve seen many misleading translations of scholia (I’ve shared a few on Textkit)! A selection of scholia with commentary may be far more useful, and, like you said, comprehensive studies are even more urgent (not to mention the forthcoming edition by Pagani et al.).

I would be interested to hear more about why you believe bT to be a unitary product, and what exactly that means. I know Martin West has a similar view (though not in print, as far as I’m aware), ultimately going back to Wilamowitz and now expanded on by Martin Schmidt. Certainly there are many “exegetical” scholia that derive from the same source, but there are also many disagreements, occasionally even on the same lemma (I’m not speaking here only of the few cases of ἄλλως discussed by Erbse and van der Valk). Schmidt attributes many exegetical tendencies in bT to one author (e.g., pro-Gk sentiment, didacticism, τα βιωτικα/praise of Homer imitating life/, refutation of Aristarchan atheteses), but these (widespread) “tendencies” defy any attempt to precisely identity origins. Regarding Aristarchan atheteses, for example, we know that the sources for bT drew on other collections of refutations of atheteses (like Pius, hence Hiller’s mistaken thesis). What sense, then, does it make to argue for a single author? What does “author” even mean in the case of tralatitious interpretive traditions? It’s a complicated issue and I don’t have any definite conclusions. I’m happy to be persuaded otherwise!