This is a thread for asking questions about the Greek that, for whatever reason, you don’t feel belong in the main Reading Group thread.
To kick things off -
6.152
εἶδός τε μέγεθός τε φυήν τ ̓ ἄγχιστα ἐΐσκω·
Why is the first τε long and the second one short?
Edit: I think I’ve answered my own question from Monro 371 - final vowel lengthening before “μ in μέγας, μέγαρον, μοίρα, μαλακός, μέλος, μελίη, μάστιξ, μόθος: but not e.g. μάκομαι, μένος, μέλας, μάκαρ, μῦθος.” I can’t tell if the e.g. is trying to demonstrate a rule or is just a kind of ‘beats me, deal with it’.
OK I’ll play.
Ἀρτέμιδί σε ἐγώ γε, Διὸς κούρῃ μεγάλοιο,
εἶδός τε μέγεθός τε φυήν τ ̓ ἄγχιστα ἐΐσκω·
(6.151-2)
How does Odysseus know what Artemis looks like?
(As to τε μέγεθός, surely it’s better to say that the mu is doubled. An episilon can’t be long.)
Sorry I’m pretty lax when I talk about syllables - in this case the “final vowel lengthening” was referring specifically to Monro’s “this power of lengthening a preceding vowel”, which I suppose is just wrong?
Is the logic ‘We know ε is always short, so there must be a double consonant at μ to make the syllable long by position’ or is there something else to suggest that ρ λ μ ν σ δ have a tendency to ‘double up’ at the beginning of words?
He and Calypso must have talked about something over their corn flakes.
I suspect your tongue is slightly in your cheek with this question, but a fuller answer is perhaps that Odysseus has no idea what she looks like and is relying on the Barnum effect with his incredibly vague εἶδός τε μέγεθός τε φυήν τ’ hoping that Nausicaa will fill in the gaps with her own mental image of Artemis and be flattered more by that than any specific description he could give. Daniel Turkeltaub promised an Odyssean follow-up to his “Perceiving Iliadic Gods” that doesn’t seem to have materialised (or maybe it’s in disguise) - perhaps the answer lies therein.
Read the entire Monro section and the next, and you’ll see that he explains about the initial consonant doubling. Also, I recommend a scanned version on archive.org. That digitized version linked is truly unreadable, with lots of ocr garbage.
This is from Bayfield’s Grammatical Introduction to the Iliad, which is drawn mostly from Monro:
https://archive.org/details/bayfieldcommentary001
mwh wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2019 10:41 pm
How does Odysseus know what Artemis looks like?
Scamandrius, who learned how to hunt from Artemis, described her in his dying words to Menelaus who passed it on to Odysseus.
“υἱὸν δὲ Στροφίοιο Σκαμάνδριον, αἵμονα θήρης,
Ἀτρεΐδης Μενέλαος ἕλ᾿ ἔγχεϊ ὀξυόεντι,
ἐσθλὸν θηρητῆρα· δίδαξε γὰρ Ἄρτεμις αὐτὴ
βάλλειν ἄγρια πάντα, τά τε τρέφει οὔρεσιν ὕλη.”
Il. 5.49-52
Ack! Undone once again by my hatred of reading that dreadful book. Thanks Joel - and thanks to Aetos too.
It’s probably the worst OCR I’ve ever seen that claims to have been edited, and yet the menu system manages to be more irritating than the mistakes in the text. Amazing.
Monro, dreadful? You may find that he is more enjoyable in hardcover or with a decent pdf. (The edited claim for the link is a lie.)
The question about how Odysseus would recognize Artemis might occur to a Jew, Muslim, or Protestant, but never to a Hindu, Catholic, or pagan Greek.
I’ve got a copy of the BCP edition, I just find he veers between long-winded and brutally terse in quite an annoying way.
I’ve read down to “It is true that the proportion of the words now in question which can be proved to have originally had an initial double consonant is not very great”, but there’s not much about doubling of μ, it seems to be mostly about ρ. Maybe there’s some more up to date thinking on this - I’d be particularly interested to know if this should be pronounced as a true double consonant.
Look at the first two sentences of 372
How does Odysseus know what Artemis looks like?
How do you know what a unicorn looks like?
I don’t see how that bit applies to τε μέγεθός though. Does the μοῖρα/smer example apply by analogy to other μ words or is it just a single example? The section beginning “Thus we may either suppose” doesn’t seem to come to any conclusions about pronunciation, only throw out suggestions. I really do find Monro frustrating.
I don’t see how that bit applies to τε μέγεθός though
Monro draws some of his knowledge from La Roche (Homerische Untersuchungen), who lists εἰδός τε μέγεθός τε as an example of lengthening a final short vowel before μ. It is only present in this phrase which is used 4 times in Homer and once in Hesiod (λ337,σ249,ο374;B58;Hesiod Scut.5). La Roche also states this lengthening is limited to a finite number of words and that even with those words the lengthening is based on metrical convenience, because the presence of another consonant cannot be proved before μέγας (or words derived from it) and that there are many instances where a final short vowel before these words remains short. The one consistent aspect of this lengthening is that it only occurs when the syllable in question is receiving the ictus.
Thank you! What an exemplary piece of prose - can we please go and paste this over the top of Monro in the archive.org copy?
Am I right in swapping vowel for consonant above (bold)?
Absolutely! Also, instead of “consonant doubling”, let’s make it “presence of another consonant before μέγας”
P.S. And thanks for the compliment! I get my inspiration from you and Seneca. It is a delight to follow the passionate, eloquent and informed dialogue that you two bring to every issue. Keep it up!!
But vowel lengthening is certainly wrong, for the reason mwh gives above. It’s only happening with certain following consonants.
Perhaps a better way to put it would be “creating a positionally long syllable before μέγας”. The way to do that is to assume that somehow the μ had been doubled at some point in its history, or perhaps a σ preceded it either naturally or by analogy.
My goodness. So Sean thinks Odysseus really had no idea what Artemis looks like, and Seneca presumes he was told how Scamandrius described her to Menelaus in the Iliad. Seneca at least must be joking even if Sean is not. (I wouldn’t say it’s quite like the unicorn, whose name bespeaks its distinctive feature, but I think Hylander’s answer was the best.)
A better question (I’d better not say a less stupid one) would be How does Homer know what she looks like?
I’d never despise Monro. He knew the Homeric language as well as anyone. He just failed to distinguish properly between vowels and syllables in describing prosodic phenomena, as everyone did back then (hence “lengthening by position” and suchlike nonsense).
Consonantal doubling: e.g. ενι μεγαροισιν was written ενιμμεγαροιϲιν in early days; cf. the orthographically regularized ἔλλαβε for ἔλαβε, etc. etc. Loss of erstwhile digamma etc. accounts for a good deal of it (just as it does for hiatus), but what Monro calls analogical extension accounts for more. And there is much more prosodic fudging in Homer than meets the eye. No doubt pronunciation practice changed through the Homeric text’s long history, as to a lesser extent did the spelling, but I don’t think doubling of the consonant can be doubted for Homer’s time. And (to repeat) short vowels can never be long.
But I hope we haven’t derailed the main thread.
Michael, you are constant mischief.
I would rephrase this as “Sean thinks Odysseus had no idea what Artemis really looks like”. Your question might not have been serious, but I do find this very interesting. Hylander and Joel indirectly point to folk representations of gods as a source of knowledge. Odysseus presumably does have an image in his head of Artemis (whether it would tally with Nausicaa’s, who knows), but would that image (or list of characteristics) be helpful if he actually saw her? It doesn’t seem to help Anchises in Hymn 5 “ἥ τις μακάρων τάδε δώμαθ᾽ ἱκάνεις, Ἄρτεμις ἢ Λητὼ ἠὲ χρυσέη Ἀφροδίτη ἢ Θέμις ἠυγενὴς ἠὲ γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη, ἤ πού…”
The gods seem to be completely in control of mortals’ ability to recognise them, whether they are in disguise or not. Only demigods recognise them while they are speaking to them - Helen recognises Aphrodite (Il. 3.395-420) by her physical appearance only because it is useful to Aphrodite to recognise her (so she can reproach her directly). Achilles and Athena the same. If a god is in complete control of whether you recognise them or not, can they truly be said to ‘look like’ anything? Is the πρόσωπον of Christ to be recognised by the eyes (beard, hair, robes) or the heart?
Thank you for expanding on τε μέγεθός - I’ll read it as the implied τε μμέγεθός. As for Monro, I don’t doubt his credentials, just his style, but Pharaoh’s heart has been softened by collective esteem so I won’t say another bad word about him.