20.248-79 Aeneas is to be the only survivor of the royal house of Troy, and here his lineage is established. (See the Genealogy, p. 617.) He will, as Poseidon says (355-56), “rule the men of Troy in power—/ his sons’ sons and the sons born in future years.” But Troy will be destroyed, and not rebuilt: Aeneas’ kingdom will be a new foundation. This was to be adopted by the Romans, the conquerors of Greece in the second century B.C., as their own foundation legend: Aeneas, with his son, Ascanius, and a band of Trojans who had escaped from the burning city, sailed west and landed in Italy, where Aeneas’ descendants later settled on the site that became the imperial city of Rome. Virgil’s great epic, the Aeneid, gave this legend its classic form.
20.286 A ship with a hundred benches: this would be an impossibly large ship.
21.378-79 A worthy match: since Hephaestus is a god whose element is fire, he is the obvious ally to call in against the waters of Scamander.
21.506 Those troubles we suffered here alongside Troy: see note 7.523-25.
21.551 He lets you kill off mothers in their labor: Artemis, as the goddess who presides over childbirth, causes deaths as well as safe deliveries.
22.35 Orion’s Dog: the Dog Star, Sirius, is the brightest star in the heavens (the name “Dog” is now reserved for the constellation in which it is seen—Canis Maior). This constellation appears to be close to the side of Orion, named after a mythical great hunter. Sirius ushers in the “dog days” of late summer—harvest time and a period of intense heat in Mediterranean countries, and a sickly season for their inhabitants. See 5.5, 11.70.
22.438 Stab his body: on the conduct of the Achaeans here, an ancient commentator remarked: “The emotion [of triumph] is that of a low mob, and it magnifies the greatness of the dead man.” (Cited from Griffin, p. 47.)
23.86 The river: the Styx. See note 2.858.
23.381 Tight-strung car: the front of the chariot (and some think the floor as well) consisted of a sort of mat of plaited leather straps.
23.492 Take the oath: see lines 646-50, where Menelaus challenges Antilochus to swear an oath that he did not commit a deliberate foul.
23.756 When Oedipus felclass="underline" the Greek word usually means “fell in batue”—a different fate from that of the hero of Sophocles’ play.
24.35-36 When they came to his shepherd’s fold: a reference to the legend of the Judgment of Paris. When the gods came to celebrate the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the goddess Strife threw a golden apple among the guests, announcing that it should be awarded as a prize to the most beautiful of the three goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. But no god was willing to take the responsibility of judging among them. Zeus finally appointed Paris, then minding his flocks on Mount Ida. All three of the goddesses offered him bribes. Hera promised to make him ruler of all Asia; Athena offered him wisdom and victory in all his battles; Aphrodite offered him the love of Helen, wife of Menelaus, the most beautiful woman in the world. He gave the apple to Aphrodite: the result was the Trojan War, and the undying hatred of Hera and Athena for Troy and the Trojans. (See Introduction, p. 41.) Poseidon hated Troy for a different reason: he had been cheated of his wages for building the walls of Troy by Laomedon, Priam’s father. See 21.505-22 and note 7.523-25.
24.97 Samos: the island facing Thrace, later called Samothrace.
24.487 This is the twelfth day: we translate the reading hide (line 413 in the Greek), not the êôs of the Oxford Classical Text.
24.545 To host an immortaclass="underline" though Achilles and his divine mother Thetis do in fact meet face-to-face (1.422-510, 18.82-162), this is not true of most of the encounters of men and gods in the Iliad. Men meet the gods in disguise (in Book 13 Poseidon disguises himself as Calchas) or the god comes to men from behind, as Athena does to Achilles in Book 1 and Apollo to Patroclus in Book 16. In older, legendary times, however, men might entertain the gods in special circumstances: Hera, for example, reminds Apollo (at 24.74—76) that he and all the gods came to the wedding feast for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis.
Z4.613-21 The gods, presumably, are the only beings to receive unmixed portions from the jar of blessings.
24.708-27 Niobe: in the usual version of the Niobe legend, she turns into stone like the rock face on Mount Sipylus in Asia Minor, which “weeps”—i.e., water runs down it. Homer adds the detail that the people too are turned into stone to explain why they did not bury the slaughtered children who lay “nine days ... in their blood.” His most telling addition, however, is that Niobe, instead of being turned into stone immediately, dries her eyes, in effect, and turns her thoughts to food—“precisety because,” as Willcock puts it, “that is what Achilles wants Priam to do” (vol. 2, p. 319).
24.866 Hurl you headlong down from the ramparts: the very fate that. after the fall of Troy, Astyanax would meet. See Introduction, p. 37.
24.899 The twentieth year for me: it does not seem likely that Helen and Paris would have taken ten years to get to Troy in the first place and then endured ten years of siege. The expression is probably just an emotional intensification. like our expression “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times ...”
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
I. Texts and Commentaries
Homeri Opera. Ed. by D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen. Vols. I and II. Oxford Classical Texts. London, 1920.
The Iliad. Ed. with apparatus criticus, prolegomena, notes and appendixes by Walter Leaf. 2d ed., 2 vols. London, 1902.
The Iliad of Homer. Ed. with introduction and commentary by M. M. Willcock. 2 vols. London, 1978-84.
Iliad: Book XXIV. Ed. by C. W. MacLeod. Cambridge, England, 1982.
The Iliad: A Commentary. General Ed., G. S. Kirk. Vol. I: Books 1-4, Kirk. Cambridge, England, 1985. Vol. II: Books 5-8, Kirk, 1990. Vol. III: Books 9-12, J. B. Hainsworth, 1993; Vol. IV: Books 13-16, Richard Janko, 1992; Vol. V: Books 17-20, Mark W. Edwards, 1991; Vol. VI: Books 21-24, Nicholas Richardson, 1993.
Iliad: Book IX: Ed. by Jasper Griffin. Cambridge, England, 1995.
II. Critical Works
Atchity. Kenneth J. Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory. Carbondale, 1978.
Critical Essays on Homer. Boston, 1987.
Adkins, A. W. H. Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values. Oxford, 1960.
Arnold, Matthew. “On Translating Homer.” In On the Classical Tradition, ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor and London, 1960.
Austin, Norman. Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer’s Odyssey. Berkeley Los Angeles and London, 1975.