Few portions of Eduard Fraenkel's commentary on Aeschylus′ Agamemnon have been so influential as the three and a half ages On the Weapon with which, according to the Oresteia, Agamemnon was murdered.1 In contrast with the controversy and disagreement stirred by his remarks on The Footprints in the Choephoroe,2 his thesis concerning Clytemnestra's murder-weapon has met with almost universal approva and the matter is widely regarded as settled. It is symptomatic that within the past twelve months two important books should (...) have appeared4 which independently assume the unquestionable Tightness of Fraenkel's conclusion: the weapon envisaged by Aeschylus was a sword, not an axe. (shrink)

Agamemnon's apology , in particular that portion which relates the story of Zeus and Ate, contains a number of oddities and peculiarities. This was recognised in antiquity, as various remarks in the Homeric scholia testify. Further inconcinnities have been unearthed by more recent scholars, who by and large belonged to the school of Homeric analysts. Although the presuppositions of this school are now generally regarded as outmoded and inappropriate, we should not underestimate the services of the scholars who drew the (...) relevant unique features to the world's attention. Ways of explaining the oddities may have changed, but the oddities themselves are still well worth considering. (shrink)

As part of his recent study of ‘Narration and allusion in Archaic Greek Art’, Professor A. M. Snodgrass has cause to treat of the famous Attic black-figure vase which depicts Circe handing a cup containing her sinister brew to one of Odysseus’ sailors. She is stirring it with her wand the while, and yet this sailor, and three companions besides, have already been transformed into various animals. Professor Snodgrass has no difficulty in explaining the apparent simultaneity of separate events here (...) and elsewhere on this vase-painting as relating to what he calls the ‘synoptic’ technique of early Greek Art, that familiar device whereby several successive episodes in a narrative are presented together within the same picture. And he is inclined towards a similar line of explanation as regards the partial transformation of Odysseus’ ἑταῖροι: the artist ‘wished to express the passage of time by indicating a half-way stage in the transformation’. (shrink)

The treatment of the goatherd Melanthius in these lines received remarkably little animadversion from earlier commentators . In contrast, the late Manuel Fernandez-Galiano devoted an extremely full note to the passage. One may wonder, however, whether he was right to base it on the automatic assumption that what we have depicted here is an act of murder. He himself admits that we are not ‘told exactly at what moment the unfortunate Melanthius dies’. :πότομος ατη κα δεινοτάτη ποιν, ξ ς εκς (...) κα θανεν τν Μελάνθιον, ε κα ποιητς κα ατ σιγι. Such lack of specificness would be most unlike Homer, and the removal of hands, feet, ears, nose and genitalia would be a remarkably laborious and uneconomical mode of instantly killing someone. Since we are not told that Melanthius dies I infer that he did not, any more than Eurytion did at Od. 21.300–2, in similarly trying circumstances: ‘they cut off his ears and nostrils with the sharp brass; but he, injured in his feelings, went about, enduring that calamity with a frantic mind’, to quote the translation by Buckley for which Housman was so grateful. (shrink)

‘More light is thrown on the poetic art of Stesichorus by the papyrus-text of his Geryoneis than by all his other fragments together.’ This verdict continues to be as true now as when it was first enunciated. But we are also in the fortunate position of being able to infer much of value about what we may term the pre-history of the legend which the poet took as the basis for his composition. And a key document within this process turns (...) out to be a text that is not preserved upon papyrus, that is not, indeed, included as part of any edition of the poet, and which has been the object of some very serious misconceptions. The relevant section consists of a phrase only three words long, but it is difficult to underestimate their importance, once they are rightly understood. (shrink)