A grammar of the Homeric dialect - Wilbourhall.org

53 /-CLASS. [55-
ernagel (Bezz. Beitr. iv. 259). The true Homeric forms, in his
view, are the original uncontracted opao), opaeis, &c. and these have
passed into the opo'co, opdqs, &c. of our Homer by a process of
textual corruption consisting of two stages
:
(i) contraction,
according to the ordinary rules of Attic, into opw, opas, &c.
which would obviously give forms of different metrical value
from the original words, and then (2)
restoration of the metre
by a kind of ' distraction ' (in the old sense of the term), i.e.
the insertion of a short vowel before the new contracted -w, -as,
&c. Thus o^x opaei? first became o^x opas, and then metri
gratia ov^ opdqs*.
4. Paradoxical as this may seem, there can be little doubt
that it is substantially right. The forms in question, as Wackernagel
justly argues, are not a genuine growth of language.
They are the result of literary tradition, that is to say, of the
modernising process which the language of Homer must have
undergone in the long period which elapsed before the poems
were cared for by scholars. The nature of this process is
excellently described and illustrated in his dissertation. In
many cases, too, he shows that when the later form of a word
ceased to fit the metre, some further change was made by
which the metrical defect was cured, or at least disguised.
Corruption of this latter kind may often be traced in the
various readings of MSS.
But must we suppose that optxo, &c. went through the two
changes which Wackernagel postulates ?
5. The case is unique, not only from the large number of
forms involved, and the singularly thorough and systematic way
in which they have been introduced into the text, but also from
the circumstance which he has himself so well pointed out,
viz. their unreal conventional stamp. They are hardly more
'
modern
'
in the sense of being familiar through contemporary
speech than the forms which they have displaced. Wackernagel
has shown how ecos and recos supplanted the original rjos
and rrjos, even where the result was absolute ruin to the verse ;
as in Od. 19. 367, where nearly all the MSS. have eW ucoio.
Similarly the loss of the old Gen. in -oo ( 98) has produced
the forms Ato'Aou, 'I^trov, 'lAiou, &c. scanned . These
examples, however, prove too much; for if such unmetrical
forms could remain in the text without further change, why
do we never find the slightest trace of an unmetrical 6p