I’m trying to translate Eustathius’ excerpts that concern Acheloios. Unfortunately (to the best of my knowledge) these have never been translated in a published work, so I’m basically on my own. Any help is very much appreciated. These translations will eventually appear in a corpus of all ancient accounts of Acheloios.
Now for the fun part:
Commentarii ad Homeri Iliadem et Odysseam I. 553, 17:
The highest point of Troy is called Mt. Ida, as many places have this label
according to traditional poetic use, in a sequential way.
But Mt. Ida is actually in Crete. Some claim all of these are of similar origin,
that the highest top of all mountains is where Ida is born, just as the waters of Okeanos
are all Acheloios, this idea carried down through Homer to the homeristai, I mention in this case Euripides;
thus the rock from which the water of Okeanos drips is the spring.
My quote above is from the TLG and added the missing bit. Here’s how I read it from the TLG version. There may be mistakes.
“Ida, Troy’s lofty peak, coming into the poem all over, having many spurs according to the ancients, is scolopendrous in shape. There is also an Ida of Crete, and every lofty mountain, they say, is called ‘Ida’ from these, just as every water is Acheloios and Oceanos from both Homer and the Homerizers, among whom Euripides also says, ‘as some rock drips Oceanos’s water’, this being a spring.”
Oh now I see, I missed ἔχουσα πρόποδας. Well spotted. Question: if Acheloios is in the nominative and Okeanos is in the genitive, wouldn’t it be “waters of Okeanos are Acheloios” as opposed to “Acheloios and Okeanos.” I think both could mean essentially the same thing but yours would require more knowledge of the tradition on the part of the reader.
I just checked the PDF of my copy. You are right and so TLG is correct. Obviously I need to be a lot more careful! My eyes must have jumped to Okeanou in the next line.
I’m happy to hear TLG has Eustathius because clearly I have difficulty transcribing him from the PDF.
I’ll probably end up outsourcing the raw translations, but I want to give them a try first. Most of the 200+passages in the corpus have been translated many times and some are public domain, so I only have about two dozen that need translations from scratch. I’m happy to talk more about the project but I believe somewhere in the rules it said I should not do that until I’m more established here.
“Ida is a high mountain of Troy, …’ [you badly misunderstand all of this first part, but it’s irrelevant to Acheloos]
— “There’s Ida of Crete too |
— And every high mountain, they say, was called Ida from these |
— just as every body of water was called Acheloos |
— And Okeanos according to Homer and the Homerizers |
— among whom is Euripides, saying ‘as a rock drips water of Okeanos’ (i.e. a stream).”
The quotation is from Euripides’ Hippolytus.
For your thesis about Acheloos you might benefit from reading Barrett’s note on this verse.
Lying there, as it’s said, is the river Dolicha and it flows out into the Achelous,
not itself joining the mainland, but (accompanying it–i.e. the Achelous) the whole
way down.
It might not seem relevant but the comparison of the various appearances of Mt. Ida to the waters of the world is what is so interesting (and unique) about Eustathius’ commentary.
W. S. Barrett’s “Hippolytos”. Here’s the relevant bit:
I accidentally cut off the relevant footnote: “Whether or not Eur. knew the Il. passage in this altered form (Okeanos is intrusive, and the source of waters was originally Acheloios).”
Uncertain if he knew of the Okeanos insertion into Il. 21.195ff. He is one of our sources for using Acheloios to mean water: Andromache 163-168; Bacchae 616-626. A fragment of Hypsipyle also indicates an Acheloios outside Aitolia/Akarnania.
I’m unable to find Eustathius’ commentary on TLG. I’ve searched the canon and searched for the different forms of Acheloios using the “text search.” Perhaps Joel or someone else would be kind enough to point out what I’m doing wrong?
