I retract what I wrote in this thread now: on rethinking, there isn't adequate justification for reading the Souda's comment about the declension of Ἄβαρις as being about the poet rather than about the Avars who are also discussed in the same entry.
It's actually two quotations joined together -- one of 29 lines, a second of 41 lines, plus two and a bit lines' worth of acrostic.
One interesting point is that the two quotations have different profiles in terms of their metrical irregularities -- to me that suggests different authorship.
Text is in New Jacoby 257 F 36 X if you have access. I'm not a fan of the commentary, though. Hansen's commentary in 'Phlegon of Tralles' Book of Marvels' (1996) is better.
Phlegon's quotation is thought to be a quotation from the actual Sibylline books (it matches Dionysios and Cicero saying they had acrostics).
However, it isn't settled whether it's from the original pre-83 BCE books, or from the replacements made afterwards. Parke thinks the replacements (I agree)
(No violations of Wernicke's Law, if you noticed its absence)
I guess that's to be expected with acrostics. But I have a feeling if I looked at acrostics in the better known Hellenistic poets, the figures would probably be a bit different.
I've been reading Phlegon's quotation from the Sibylline books.
In 72 lines of hexameter (including the acrostics) there are 6 Attic correptions, and many metrical 'laws' violated: 16× Varro’s Bridge, 2× Hermann’s Bridge, 15× Meyer’s Laws (1× First, 7× Second, 7× Third), and 1× Tiedke-Meyer’s Law.
I haven't got a Zipf graph for the Iliad at my fingertips, but here's one for the Odyssey! :-)
(Bottom axis = rank by frequency of a given word, vertical axis = number of occurrences; the line at the bottom right is all the hapaxes in the epic)
At the other end of the scale, 1,771 words appear once in the Iliad, a.k.a. hapaxes (not including proper names). These represent 1.6% of the text, but 32.5% of the vocabulary.
These rates will vary depending on which edition you use - mostly because of spelling choices, not textual variants.
The following 17 words appear 56,819 times in the Iliad:
δέ, ὁ, καί, τε, ἐγώ, εἰμί, ἐν, σύ, ὅς, μέν, ἄρα, ἄν, οὐ, ἐπί, γάρ, ἀλλά, and τις.
They represent over half of the text of the Iliad (50.9% of all tokens), but only 0.3% of the vocabulary (5,448 types).
Still of a clip shown on BBC, 13 March 2026
Well that's nice - episodes 1 and 3 of The Daleks' Master Plan (1965-66) have been recovered. 5 of the 12 episodes are now intact (episodes 1, 2, 3, 5, and 10).
(I have a vested interest since one of the Doctor's companions in these episodes was an ancient Trojan)
A note on Abaris of Hyperborea.
The Souda (α.18) gives his name with the declension Ἄβαρις, Ἀβάριδος, but with an accusative plural Ἀβάρις (i.e. Ἀβάρῑς) 'by apocope'.
Ἀβάρῑς isn't apocope. It's a double declension in ‑ιδ‑ and ‑ι‑, like Δικαιόπολις > gen. sg. Δικαιοπόλιδος, acc. sg. Δικαιόπολιν.
Instead of the article title, which is "*ʢʷneHª- in Greek" JSTOR has (highlighted) "Math input error in Greek"
Eric Hamp broke JSTOR lmao
Oh for fuck's sake.
I'm sure the science is fine, but this is an answer in search of a question. There's nothing to explain. There are NO ancient reports of 'beatific visions' or life-changing ecstatic experiences in the course of Eleusinian initiation: Kerényi made it up out of thin air in 1960.
...question of the alphabet used to transcribe Homer. As you point out, 24 books assumes Ionic letters. The 'metagrammatism' theory isn't popular - it upsets a LOT of ideas about language, metrical lengthening, etc - but it certainly happened sometimes (Aeschylus didn't use the Ionic alphabet!)
Very nice summary! I suggest adding to the biblio Berg and Haug (2000), 'Dividing Homer (continued). Innovation vs tradition in Homer', Symbolae Osloenses 75: 5-23 (not that I agree with everything they say).
One thing I'd like to see discussed more often in connection with book-division is the...
Where Did Homeric Book Divisions Come From? Thinking about the thematic Unity of book 14
sententiaeantiquae.com/2026/02/25/w...
"we have no evidence of Alphabetic book distinctions before the Hellenistic period (when earlier authors talk about Homeric passages, they focus on episodes); we don’t have any evidence for book divisions as performance units"
sententiaeantiquae.com/2026/02/25/w...
"If we imagine Homeric epic existing notionally between episodic performances and monumental events involving multiple singers, we can see these episodes coalescing around smaller performance units that could be stitched together in grander contexts."
sententiaeantiquae.com/2026/02/25/w...
...not a _good_ treatment, mind. Wyatt's position is basically: 'Can we call this short syllable at the start of the line "metrical lengthening"? I'm going to say yes. There, everything is explained!'
Never mind, there's a full treatment in Wyatt's Metrical Lengthening (1969)!
I've found 63 acephalous lines in Homer (lines that start with a short syllable). I doubt that's complete though.
Does anyone know where to find a complete list?
A rate of 0.23% acephaly suggests to me that it's more than an anomaly, even if specific explanations apply in some cases.
For those who don't know, Hermann's Bridge is the most fundamental known feature of the Homeric hexameter - even more universal than starting a line with a long syllable. 99.95% of Homeric and Hesiodic lines respect Hermann's Bridge. (The Hymns have a higher rate of violations.)
By the way, does anyone out there have a a digital copy of Fränkel's 'Der kallimachische und homerische Hexameter' (Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, phil.-hist. Klasse, 1926, vol. 3)? It isn't online anywhere as far as I can find.
Diagram of the main bridges in the Homeric hexameter, using modern musical notation
Diagram illustrating Hermann's Bridge, using metrical notation
In case it's of any use to anyone: a couple of metrical diagrams, showing (a) the main bridges (and caesuras) in Homeric hexameter, and (b) an explanation of two ways of envisaging Hermann's Bridge/Wernicke's Law.
Actually it's the lyrics in 'The Kitchen' that are really tantalising, because the choir is more audible, so you'd think it'd be easy. There's lots about feasting 'in the pit of Doom', but also many syllables I still can't discern.
Thank you! That track is especially difficult because the choir is quite in places. As far as I can tell the Latin isn't as dire as he says - 'Hail X, hail Y' is at straightforward, and those are some of the lines I can actually make out!
I've wasted too much time this morning trying to make out the Latin lyrics sung by the choir in Poledouris' soundtrack to Conan the Barbarian (1982). All the transcriptions I can find online are _wildly_ wrong.
Not easy when the sound is so muffled, and I can't be certain it's even grammatical!
There's this bizarre myth going around that historians agree there was a historical Trojan War. Here's a look at what scholars are actually saying.
(Not directly to do with the upcoming Odyssey film. But tangentially relevant if anyone thinks historical accuracy has anything to do with it!)
