A grammar of the Homeric dialect - Wilbourhall.org

401.] THEORIES OF THE DIGAMMA. 377
in which the F affects the metre o Homer be reconciled with
the not inconsiderable number of passages in which it is neglected?
The scholars who first became aware of the traces of a lost
letter in Homer assumed that in the original form of the poems
this letter, or at least the consonantal sound for which it afterwards
stood, was consistently used that it was in fact one of
the ordinary sounds of the language and
; accordingly they
directed their efforts to restoring it to the text. This was the
principle on which Bentley made his famous series of emendations
: and which was carried out by Bekker in his edition
of 1858. Of late years, however, different views of the matter
have been taken. Leskien seems to have been the first to
maintain that the passages which do not admit F are not
necessarily corrupt or spurious, but are to be regarded
as evidence
of an original fluctuation in the use of the sound. His
view is adopted and defended by Curtius (Grundz. p. 56; 5^ ec^)'
Prof. Hartel has more recently put forward a theory which
agrees with that of Curtius in treating the apparent neglect of
the F as part of the original condition of the text. But he
ascribes this neglect, not to irregularity
in the use of the sound,
but to the intermediate half-vowel character of the sound itself.
400.] If we are not satisfied that the F had the value of an
ordinary consonant at the time when the Homeric poems were
produced (or when they received their present form), we may
explain the influence which it has on the metre in several ways.
Hypothesis of alternative forms. We may suppose that
each word that originally had initial F was known to Homeric
times in two forms, an older form with the F confined perhaps
to the archaic or poetical style and a later in which F was no
longer heard. Just as the poet could say either o-Gs or us, either
TroXis or iTToXis, either reXeWai or reXeom, so he may have had the
choice between F&va% and fiwxf, 'Fififo and TJSu's,
&c.
In order to test the probability of this hypothesis, let us take
a few common words of different metrical form, and which show
no trace of F, the words "Apyjs, apioros, ey^os, fyiap, ojuXos, 60aXjJios,
u'Swp, faros. These words, with their immediate derivatives,
occur in the Iliad 1022 times ;
and the places that would not
admit an initial consonant number 684, or just two-thirds of the
whole. Again, take some of the commonest words with F, ai>a,
d'oTu, e'pyoi/, OIKOS, and the Aorist lbe.lv. These occur in the Iliad
685 times, and the exceptions are hardly 50, or about onefourteenth.
Compared with the other proportion this surely
proves that the recognition of the F in these words was not
arbitrary, but was the rule in Homeric verse.
401.] Explanation from fixed phrases, &c. The traces of F