Yes and every time I tell someone what I did yesterday it’s an ‘act of recollection’ but that doesn’t mean it’s always relevant to follow it with “but of course, this is only my own memory of the event”.
The bikini ladies are cool, though. What are they doing in the top left?
Perhaps I should have said ‘reminds us more clearly of the power dynamic between Artemis and these animals’.
This did remind me, though, of Shakespeare’s Venus
He tells her, no; to-morrow he intends
To hunt the boar with certain of his friends.
‘The boar!’ quoth she; whereat a sudden pale,
Like lawn being spread upon the blushing rose,
Usurps her cheek; she trembles at his tale,
The first figure seems to have some weights. Perhaps training? The second figure has a discus.
Another “very small point” from me:
In line 95 there’s a past iterative - ἀποπλύνεσκε.
Is there any particular thought on why iterative forms with σκ dropped out of Greek except in certain verbs? I note that they’re particularly good at supplying syllables long by position, which got me wondering whether they’re one of the older bits of Homer kept for the metre. As ever, happy to be handed a link instead of an explanation.
Yours naively…
A few disconnected casual pensées on this passage, the first taking off from Sean’s Shakespeare with its reminder of the danger of hunting wild boars.
Venus’ fears, of course, were justified. ω τον Αδωνιν, goes the old refrain of her lament—which gives the name to the closing cadence of the hexameter, the so-called adonic section (following the “bucolic” diaeresis).
(Incidentally, for any who don’t know, Homer accurately describes a boar’s tusk helmet, an artifact known only in Mycenean times, showing that the poems preserve memory of a much earlier era—and that boar’s tusks were far from impossible to acquire.)
The simile nicely anticipates Odysseus’ own flattering comparison of Nausicaa to Artemis in the next scene. But we don’t get to that till next week.
The archer goddess and her nymphs disporting themselves in the mountains, carefree—a type-scene (beloved of painters), and we know what comes next: an outsider’s intrusion, his discovery, a swift change of atmosphere and dire consequences. (Seneca already mentioned Actaeon, and there are many others.) That’s the template, at the poet’s disposal to play with. Cue the discovery of Odysseus. What will the reaction be?
The simile obliquely stresses another thing that Nausicaa has in common with Artemis: they are both virgins. The point is obvious but is withheld till the very end (109): Nausicaa is not called Nausicaa but παρθένος ἀδμής (an emphatic combination)—but for how long will she remain so? The marriage theme has been insistently sounded. Cue Odysseus’ entrance into her maiden life, naked.
Homer has two structures for thwarted potential outcomes. (1) “X was on the point of happening when Y happened” (as here, ἔμελλε 110), and (2) “Then X would have happened had not Y happened.” This second one, deploying εἰ μή, is reserved for momentous events, frustrated in the nick of time.
I would have gone on εἰ μή I’d written more than enough.
I don’t know if we can say why these forms went out of common use (there being no steering committee for Archaic Greek verb forms, unfortunately), but Sihler has a bit to say on them (§456.3B and 467). He notes that the ske/o iteratives are very productive in Anatolian, but less so in Sanskrit and older Greek. By the classical period, he observes that the original sense of the iterative is lost, and that this was true in Sanskrit as well.
The meaning “was accustomed to” is familiar (he gives μαχέσκετο from μάχομαι as an example), but more common with reduplicated verbs (γιγνώσκω for example) than others. One interesting observation he makes is that in some cases an iterative stem is affixed to a verb that already contains one, after the original iterative affix was reinterpreted as part of the root! Consider βοσκέσκοντο (they were accustomed to being fed) from βόσκω (feed [an animal]). Sihler closes his notes on this in 456 by saying that “Large numbers of Hom. forms in -σκ- are uniquely attested, which is what one would expect of a freely productive type, used opportunistically.”
So it seems like these iteratives were more prominent in some branches of the family than others, and gradually fell out of use in both Greek and Sanskrit, only remaining around for a few verbs where, perhaps, the iterative had replaced the simplex in common use.
Well that seems remiss - it’s a wonder they made it to modern Greek with that attitude.
Thanks for looking this up. I’m not sure what precisely Sihler means by ‘opportunistically’ in the context of production of the Homeric poems - where they’re useful for the metre compared with a straight imperfect?