A grammar of the Homeric dialect - Wilbourhall.org

389-] DIGAMMA. 361
The reason may be found (as Hartel thinks*) in the nature of
the Vocative as an interruption of the natural flow of a sentence.
It is very possible, however, that the Nominative ought to be
read in these places
: see 164.
The Digamma.
388.] In seeking to arrive at general conclusions as to the
rules and structure of the Homeric hexameter, it was necessary
to leave out of sight all the words whose metrical form is
uncertain on account of the possible or probable loss of an
initial consonant. It is time to return to this disturbing
element of the enquiry.
The scholars who first wrote on this subject had few materials
for their investigations outside of the Homeric poems. To them,
therefore, the ' Digamma ' was little more than a symbol the
unknown cause of a series of metrical anomalies. In the present
state of etymological knowledge the order of the enquiry
has been to a great extent reversed. It is known in most cases
which of the original sounds of the Indo-European languages
have been lost in Greek, and where in each word the loss has
taken place. Hence we now come to Homer with this knowledge
already in our possession. Instead of asking what sounds
are wanting, we have only to ask whether certain sounds, of
whose former existence we have no doubt, were still living at
the time when the poems were composed, and how far they can
be traced in their effect on the versification.
389.] Nature of the evidence from metre. The questions
which are suggested by the discovery in Homer of traces of a
lost ' Digamma ' cannot be answered without some reference to
the very exceptional circumstances of the text.
Whatever may be the date at which writing was first used
in Greece for literary purposes, there can be no doubt that the
Homeric poems were chiefly
known for some centuries through
the medium of oral recitation, and that it was not till the time
of the Alexandrian grammarians that adequate materials were
brought together for the study and correction of the text.
Accordingly when these scholars began to collect and compare
the manuscripts of Homer, they found themselves engaged in a
problem of great complexity. The various readings, to judge
from the brief notices of them preserved in the Sctiolia, were
very numerous; and they are often of a kind which must be
attributed to failure of memory, or the licence of oral recita-
And the amount of
tion, rather than to errors of transcription.
* Homerische Studien, i. p. 64.