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1-204. This passage, which contains the Second “Νέκυια” of the Odyssey, was rejected by Aristarchus. His objections, together with the replies to them which satisfied later grammarians, are preserved by the scholiasts, in a summary of remarkable brevity (see Sch. M.V.). The replies are often successful in showing that particular arguments are inconclusive: but the cumulative effect of the reasoning can hardly be resisted. Moreover, it is reinforced by other considerations. The most obvious is that in an epic poem such as the Odyssey the introduction of a second ‘descent into Hades’ must be, poetically speaking, a failure. The scholiasts argue that the eleventh book describes a piece of ‘soothsaying by means of the dead,’ while the present passage is in the full sense a ‘visit to the dead’ (“καὶ Νεκυομαντείαν μὲν ἄν τις εἰκότως τὴν Λ εἶπεν, Νέκυιαν δὲ ταύτην”). But the dialogues in the two books are similar to a degree that renders the second a frigid repetition of motifs already exhausted. We may add that the language shows clear traces of a later period. The objections made by Aristarchus are noticed in the notes on ll. 1, 2, 11 ff., 23, 50, 60, 63, 150; for other traces of spuriousness see ll. 1 (“Ἑρμῆς”), 19, 28 (“πρῶϊ”), 30, 52, 57, 79, 88-89, 128, 155, 158, 166, 198.

Ἑρμῆς. This contraction is doubtless post-Homeric (cp. 14. 435). The Homeric form appears in l. 10, in the phrase “Ἑρμείας ἀκάκητα”. The use of “Ἑρμείας” in that archaic phrase is no reason for attempting to correct the first line (“ψυχὰς δ᾽ Ἑρμείας” Van Leeuwen). The old form subsists as a poetical archaism along with the new one.

Κυλλήνιος, as Aristarchus observed, is a post-Homeric epithet of Hermes. It is common in the Homeric Hymns (H. Merc. 318, &c., xvii. 1., xviii. 31). The word occurs in Il.15. 518, not in reference to Hermes or Mount Cyllene, but as the adj. from “Κυλλήνη”, a town in Elis.

Homer's Odyssey. W. Walter Merry. James Riddell. D. B. Monro. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1886-1901.

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