8.82 Fates of death: the Greek word is kêrês. A kêr was a man’s individual fate, especially his death. Sometimes the word is used impersonally to mean death or doom, and sometimes a kêr is a personified spirit of death, as on the shield of Achilles, 18.623.
8.149 Irreversible chaos: because Zeus’s promise to Thetis would have been broken, the will of Zeus thwarted, if Diomedes’ triumphant advance had continued.
8.331 Tripod: a large pot or cauldron standing on three legs so it can straddle a fire. Often highly ornamented for presentation as a gift or prize, its metal construction made it unusually valuable and rare.
8.399 Or Ares’: we translate the reading of the ancient critic Zenodotus (êe = “or”) rather than the reading of most manuscripts, and the Oxford Classical Text (êdt = “and”), at line 349 in the Greek.
8.334 Cronus and Iapetus: the two most important of the Titans, the family of the gods that ruled before Zeus and the Olympians. (Cronus was the father of Zeus, Iapetus of Prometheus.) Zeus and his brothers and sisters overthrew Cronus and the Titans in a ten years’ war: the Titans were all confined in Tartarus, the lowest depths of the world of the dead. See note 14.244.
9.73-75 These lines (63-64 in the Greek), obviously proverbial in expression, have been thought out of place here: what is their exact reference? And why the mention of civil war? But Nestor, though he must press Agamemnon to make a conciliatory move toward Achilles, must not go too far: Agamemnon is still a powerful king, a dangerous enemy. So his remarks are general—he could be attributing the danger of dissension, even fighting, among the Achaeans to Achilles, to Agamemnon, or to both of them.
9.78 The trench we dug ouuide the rampart: Homer’s description of the wall and the ditch is unclear, even confusing at times. Here it seems that the Achaeans had left a level space between the rampart and the ditch: it is in this that the sentries are to take their posts.
9.176 Bride-price: expensive gifts offered by the suitor to the bride’s father. This seems to have been the normal custom in heroic times (see, for example, 16.209, 16.225 and 22.555), but it is here combined with the later custom—a dowry offered by the bride’s father.
9.505 Death will not come on me quickly: this line, which repeats in different wording the thought of the previous line, was condemned by two of the great Alexandrian editors of the lliad, Zenodotus and Aristarchus, as an interpolation.
9.558-62 These lines (458-61 in the Greek) are not to be found in the manuscript tradition. Plutarch, writing in the first century A.D., quotes them and adds that Aristarchus, the most severe of the Alexandrian editors, expunged them, because he was shocked by them (if that is what Plutarch’s word phobêtheis means in this context).
9.646-729 The story of Meleager, as we know it from later sources, is very different from Homer’s version. Elsewhere (in Aeschylus and Bacchylides, for example) Althaea was told by the fates that her newborn son Meleager would live as long as the log on the fire remained unconsumed. She took it off the fire, extinguished it and hid it in the chest. Later, when, in a quarrel over the spoils of the Calydonian hunt, Meleager killed Althaea’s brother, she put the log back in the fire and he died. Homer’s account makes Meleager’s situation such a close parallel to that of Achilles that critics have suspected that he invented it. (See Introduction, pp. 50-52, and note 9.672.) This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that Cleopatra, who urged him to go back to the battle, as Patroclus does Achilles, has a name consisting of the same two elements as Patroclus’ name (patr- and cl-), in reverse. And Homer goes out of his way to explain that Cleopatra was called by another name—Alcyone (Hatcyon)—by her parents.
9.675 Their own city walls: the language is confusing here, and interpretation disputed. We have taken the lines to mean that the Aetolians beat the Curetes back to their own walls (as the Achaeans did the Trojans before Achilles withdrew from the battle): this fortifies Phoenix’s parallel.
9.679-88 Marpessa: Idas and the god Apollo were both in love with Marpessa, and Apollo carried her off. Idas confronted him, and Zeus prevented a fight, asking Marpessa to choose between them. She chose Idas, and called her daughter Halcyon in commemoration of the time she wailed like the seabird on being parted from him,
9.741 The great decree of Zeus: we take the phrase Dios aisêi (608 in the Greek) in this sense, a reference to Zeus’s promise to Thetis to make the Achaeans regret their treatment of Achilles. Other possible interpretations are: “‘by the dispensation of Zeus’; i.e., by [Achilles‘] status and position in the world” (Willcock), “by the just measure [of Zeus]” (Leaf), “honored already in Zeus’s ordinance” (Lattimore).
9.772 Accept the blood-price: see note 18.581-92.
10.315 The lucky sign: it was lucky because the heron was on their right hand. This idea that signs on the right are lucky and on the left unlucky is common in many cultures and languages: our word “sinister,” for example, is the Latin word for “left.” See 12.230-39, 24.377-91.
11.4 Storm-shield: Homer does not make it clear exactly what Strife holds in her fists: we suggest that it is the aegis of Zeus. See 5.846-50 and note 2.529.
11.892 Their real father. Poseidon: like Heracles and many another Greek hero, the twin Moliones had two fathers, one human and one divine. The Greek has no equivalent of the word “real,” but it seemed called for by the situation—it is Poseidon who saves their lives.
12.61-64 There are more confused memories of war-chariots here: obviously a war-chariot pulled by horses could not leap over a wide ditch, though a man on a horse might.
12.205 Blaze of war: since fire is not much use against a rock wall, we have taken the Greek phrase as a metaphor.
13.6-8 A world away: all these peoples—Thracians, Mysians, Hippemolgi and the Abii—are located to the north of Troy.
13.14 Samos facing Thrace: the island usually known as Samothrace, not the large island of Samos off the south-central coast of Asia Minor, or the island off the western coast of Greece, part of Odysseus’ kingdom, later known as Cephallenia. See note 24.97.
13.247 [Poseidon‘s] own grandson: i.e., Amphimachus (1), whose death is described in 221-23.
13.632 The whole vein: there is of course no such vein. Aristotle, who quotes the passage (HA 513b 26-29), identifies it with the vena cava, but this vein is not near enough to the surface to be “sheared ... clear.”