odyssey 11.109

I cannot believe I got the Odyssey twice in the first week, but random is (pseudo-)random, I guess.

Homer, Odyssey 11.100–09

ὣς φάτ', ἐγὼ δ' ἀναχασσάμενος ξίφος ἀργυρόηλον
κουλεῷ ἐγκατέπηξ'. ὁ δ' ἐπεὶ πίεν αἷμα κελαινόν,
καὶ τότε δή μ' ἐπέεσσι προσηύδα μάντις ἀμύμων·
’νόστον δίζηαι μελιηδέα, φαίδιμ' Ὀδυσσεῦ·
τὸν δέ τοι ἀργαλέον θήσει θεός. οὐ γὰρ ὀΐω
λήσειν ἐννοσίγαιον, ὅ τοι κότον ἔνθετο θυμῷ,
χωόμενος ὅτι οἱ υἱὸν φίλον ἐξαλάωσας.
ἀλλ' ἔτι μέν κε καὶ ὧς, κακά περ πάσχοντες, ἵκοισθε,
αἴ κ' ἐθέλῃς σὸν θυμὸν ἐρυκακέειν καὶ ἑταίρων,
ὁππότε κεν πρῶτον πελάσῃς εὐεργέα νῆα
Θρινακίῃ νήσῳ, προφυγὼν ἰοειδέα πόντον,
βοσκομένας δ' εὕρητε βόας καὶ ἴφια μῆλα
Ἠελίου, ὃς πάντ' ἐφορᾷ καὶ πάντ' ἐπακούει.

Thus he spoke and, drawing back, I resheathed my silver-studded sword. And after that, he drank the black blood, and then the [static] priest addressed me with these words: "You seek honey-sweet return, shining Odysseus: a god ordained pain for you. For I do not believe you will escape the notice of the earth-shaker, who has vengeance in his heart for you, enraged that you blinded his beloved son. But still, you should reach home, suffering much evil, if you are willing to curb your heart and that of others, when first you bring your well-wrought ship near the island of Thrinakia, fleeing from the violet sea, and you find the grazing cows and fat goats of Helios, who oversees all and overhears all.

notes

ἀμύμων: Fun fact about this word: I wrote an eight page paper on this word in the fall and I don't have a good answer for what it means. The traditional reading is that it means something like "blameless",^[1] but there are quite a few places where that would be weird. Like, one of Achilles' horses is called ἀμύμων in the Iliad; am I meant to understand that the horse was found not guilty at its trial for whatever crimes for which horses stand accused? Also, the entire race of Ethiopians is ἀμύμων, apparently.

My final proposal was that it should be taken to mean "extraordinary" or something like it, without a strictly positive connotation.^[2] This strikes me as a bit of a cop-out, in that it fits because of its lack of specificity; however, it does fit.

ἰοειδέα: This adjective means "like an ἴον", with an ἴον being a violet. This is mostly interesting to me because I'm queer and Sappho refers to them a handful of times, especially with the lovely adjective ἰόκολπος, which seems to mean something like "with violets in her lap". Violets were used as a symbol by queer women as a reference to this.

This goes back to the scholiasts (ancient scholars whose notes on Homer, called the scholia, still exist). Homer's poetry is so very old that the language was already archaic in the 3rd century BCE and the scholiasts included definitions (or occasionally plain guesses) of words that were obscure to them; many of these are based on folk etymologies and quite a few are less than convincing.^{^}
The most famous example where "blameless" falls short as a definition is when ἀμύμων is used by Agamemnon's ghost to describe Aegisthus, his cousin who slept with his wife and murdered him. "Blameless" seems wildly inappropriate here; "extraordinary", in the pure sense of "far from the norm", fits better.^{^}