“Dad, how did the Trojans and Achaeans cast lots with helmets?” I received this question today from the pre-K Homeric scholar of the household. I thought that she had been referring to Ajax and Hector, but when I asked, the example that she gave was of Odysseus’ men on Circe’s island.
I gave her a story about their marking stones and swirling them around in a helmet for a blind draw, which satisfied her curiosity, but also made me curious whether an ancient description existed.
Here are the first few interesting hits from the scholia for κλῆρος. There are many more references that I did not even try to look up.
The claim here is that the heroes who knew every art also knew the art of letters (and therefore wrote their names on the lots). But the interesting bit here is the other suggestion: “But some say that, as with the Egyptians, they wrote sacred pictures, by means of which matters were made clear.” A belief among some commentators that the Greek heroes wrote Linear A/B, or at least hieroglyphs of some kind?
“αἱ πᾶσαι” seems to be used from time to time to refer to all commentaries. Ex. οὕτως αἱ πᾶσαι πλὴν τῆς Ζηνοδότου. A pure guess on my part is that the feminine noun meant is σχολή, so “all schools”.
If πεπάλαχθε, I guess that it would either refer to each hero sprinkling in his lot, or to maybe marking it with blood.
αι πασαι does mean all editions. We don’t have to believe it. The mss are divided.
The ancient categories of scholarly production, mutually distinct, are εκδοσις, συγγραμμα, and υπομνημα. They’ve been much discussed. The etymologies are mostly scholia minora.
Yes, I had an instance of ὑπόμνημα being distinguished from σύγγραμμα as well: εἰ γὰρ τὰ συγγράμματα τῶν ὑπομνημάτων προτάττοιμεν
But you don’t answer the objection. Our word “edition” is broad and universal in this age of printing, and when we talk about “all editions” we are also saying “all copies.” But that’s obviously not the case here. αἱ πᾶσαι ἐκδόσεις doesn’t mean “all copies.” He’s talking about ἐκδόσεις as somewhat independent from other manuscripts which evidently read πεπάλαχθε.
On the other hand, taking ἔκδοσις as “revision” or “critical edition”, one released by a big name scholar at that, would be a lot easier to fit to what he’s saying. Our scholiast, I think, would have called something like West’s Ilias an ἔκδοσις, but not my no-name school copy.
Well yes Joel, αι πασαι obviously doesn’t mean all copies. There were thousands of copies, no two identical. “Edition” is the conventional translation of εκδοσις, and I don’t think there’s a better one. The various Homeric εκδοσεις have been much discussed.