FOR THE THIRD TIME: ARCHILOCHUS AND THE ANT

In his excellent book on Archilochus ', Francesco Bossi deals with the vari-ous supplements proposed for fr. 23, 15 West:

xò]v 8' è%0pòv èx0aipeiy xe [KOC]Ì KOCKO[

I had proposed KaKo[v3v dxe in order to provide a better syntactic integration for the following |ru]pu.T|^ 2. In a second paper \ I discussed KOCKO[T<; Sociceìv, which had been advanced by Bossi4. Finally, I re-examined the entire complex of problems in a commentary on the fragment \ Therefore, it will be sufficient here to cover some of the points at issue; a complete treatment would be superfluous.

One of my arguments against Bossi's KOIKOI*; was that the short dative plural endings -T|i<; and -oi<; are not Ionie, except in the article. Instances of these end-ings do occur in the iambographers, but rarely. When they do occur, they are to be considered borrowings from epic Greek. From a methodological point of view, it appears unwarranted to admit such borrowings in poems composed in stichic iambic trimeters, unless there are certain parallels. As a matter of a fact, the short datives are found in Archilochus' trochaic tetrameters, epodes and elegies, but they are not attested in his iambus properly speaking. The occurrences in Hipponax and Semonides are rather dubious.

In my view, Ananius fr. 3,1 et xiq Kcc0£Ìp£,ca xp-uoòv èv Só|ioi<; TCOA/UV,

on which Bossi bases himself to defend the short dative of his conjecture 6, is not a certain parallel of the kind mentioned above, quite apart from the fact that the plural is not beyond suspicion here 7. As I have said else-

1 Studi su Archiloco, Bari 19902, 104-108. 2 Archilochus and the ant, «ZPE» XLV (1982) 69f. 3 Once more. Archilochus and the ant, «ZPE» LUI (1983) 31-36. 4 Appunti per un profilo di Archiloco, «QS» VII (1981) 142 n. 62. 5 Archilochus. Poem(s) in iambic trimeters in J.M. Bremer-A.M. van Erp Taalman Kip-

S.R. Slings, Some recently found Greek poems, Leiden 1987, 1-23, esp. 9-11. 6 Studi 108.

The required meaning appears to be 'room' rather than 'house', and even for 'house', the plural is highly poetic; hence Ahrens' conjecture Sóuon. But in the case of an iambic poet

1 4 SLINGS

where 8, Ananius' dialect contains a number of non-Ionie elements which appear to go beyond the limits of what is permitted in the iambic poetry of Archilochus, Semonides and Hipponax. I am speaking of the epicisms K£ and -£GO~i (dative plural of the third declension), and of the form KCÌA.COV (from KaXóq), which is neither epic nor Ionie. Let me give the essential data for each of these features.

K£ (Ananius fr. 3, 3 q) is used by Archilochus, too, but only in his trochaic tetrameters, which have a much more 'literary' character than the stichic trimeters. It is frequent in elegiac poetry "'. -£oai is found Ananius fr. 5, 8 ix0U£aotv , but nowhere else in the iambographers. The ending occurs in the elegists, although not very frequently | : . As for KdXóq (fr. 5, 2): no other occurrence in iambus, only one in elegy, not counting Attic poets '3; I know of only four instances in epic, and rather unevenly spread, too: two in Hesiod and two in the Hymn to Aphrodite

Apart from these thoroughly un-Ionic elements, the Ionie character of Ananius' poetry is rather superficial on the whole 13. Obviously, we have to do with a poet who is not very sensitive to details of dialect. It seems probable, therefore, that he was not an Ionian - naturally, for iambic poetry the Ionie or quasi-Ionic dialect

who is prepared to use phonological and morphological epicisms as frequently as Ananius is, it is unwise to reject a morphosyntactic epicism.

! Review of E. Degani, Studi su Ipponatte (Bari 1984), «Mnemosyne» XL (1987) 188-191, esp. 189.

4 One should not correct x ooon or x oaov io KÓGOV (Knox): both witnesses exhibit -%-. Compare also the parallels for yvoirn; x' P ' u s a form of òooq or otoq collected by E. Degani in his edition of Hipponax (Hipponactis testimonia et fragmenta, Leipzig 1983 [1991"]), 184 in the apparatus on fr. 219 (= Anan. fr. 3 West).

10 Cf. M.L. West, Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus, Berlin-New York 1974, 103. West wishes to eliminate the irregularity by proposing ì^Ovo' éoxìv (in his apparatus;

cf. Studies 169). However, the elision of -oi is not certainly attested in iambus or elegy, cf. West himself, 1 16. In other words, his conjecture is methodically wrong, in that it fails to meet the primary demand to make of any conjecture, namely, that it should create no new problems. Besides, the èoxìv of West's conjecture causes a rather inelegant repetition of the èaii which is transmitted in the preceding line.

12 West, Studies 95-98. xq>.e9deaai in the First Cologne Epode, Archil. fr. 196a, 43. should be interpreted as dative plural of an adjective ending in -eie,, gen. -evxo<;, and therefore does not have the ending -eooi, as West appears to assume (cf. my comment, 1987, 45f.). There seems to be no other extant dative plural form of these adjectives in Ionie, but the ending to be expected is -eoi, as in Attic. The originai *-/rrjxoi > *-Faoai was replaced by -(F)eaai in ali dialects through analogy with the other cases (evxeq, -évxcov, -evxaq); a regu-. lar sound-law changed -eooi to -eoi in Ionic-Attic.

I? West, Studies 88. 14 Hes. Th. 585, Op. 63; H. Ven. 29, 261. 15 It has been exaggerated besides. ìcpéoaco (fr. 3, 3) is not Ionie (so West, Studies 99)

but common Greek: the comparatives in -*ya)v/-ia)v lengthen the stem vowel only in Attic Kpéoaov is in fact attested for Sappho (fr. 90b. 20 Voigt).

FOR THE THIRD TIME: ARCHILOCHUS AND THE ANT 15

had become compulsory by Ananius' time l6. The recent hypothesis that he was of West-Ionie extraction l7 is entirely gratuitous: it reposes on the fallacy that because Ananius wrote in Ionie, he must have been an Ionian - besides, one of the two data on which this hypothesis is based is spurious 18. However that may be, Ananius' usage is clearly no support for Archilochus'.

Two more points against KOCKOK; SOCKEÌV. Bossi does not answer another ob-jection raised by me, namely that one would have expected the present rather than the aorist infinitive l9. It is true that in Philodemus' imitation we do find the aorist (yivcóoKco xapiEooa <JUA£TV nàXi xòv <j)iÀ£ovxa, m i Tr.d>.i ytvcóoKco xóv |ii£ SOCKÓVXO:

8aK£tv 20); there, however, the aorist infinitive SOCKEÌV is determined by the pre-ceding participle ('he who has bitten me'), whereas in Archilochus the infinitive is preceded by present infinitives (<|)iÀ£iv, è%0aip£iv)21. Besides, it may well be that Bossi's plural KOCKOIC; requires the (iterative) present a fortiori.

And finally, one may ask if the phrase KOKOTC; 8aK£iv is really felicitous. In this context, 'to bite' in itself gives perfect sense, given the following u.óp|ir|^. But exactly what is meant by 'to bite with evils'? Bossi translates «mordere con le mie ingiurie,» thus rightly underscoring the echo of <J)àxiv ... KOCKTIV from line

16 The terminus ante is given by Epich. fr. 58 Kaibel (= 22 Olivieri) KOCXXÒV 'Avrivtov, referring to Anan. fr. 5, 1. Cf. Degani, o.c. (cf. above, n. 8) 25-28.

17 West, Studies 88: «Its occurrence [viz., of KG^WV] in Ananius, combined with the fact that he has noi) not KOD, suggests that he was a western and not an eastern Ionian». In actual fact, the absence of the so-called third compensatory lengthening (*KaXFóc, > KdA.óq) is more or less certain only for the dialect of Euboea, where on the other hand -xx- instead of -co- is the rule, whereas in Ananius one finds Kpéaoco (fr. 3, 3), QaXàoonc, (fr. 5, 7) - for u.t>xxa>xtoi (fr. 5, 8, so the codd.), see West, Studies 91.

IS We do not know whether Ananius wrote KOV or KO\J: the adverb is found in fr. 1, 1, a line attested only by Aristophanes (Ran. 659; copied by Tzetz. ad /., p. 874 Koster), who, naturally, had to use KOV even if the text of Ananius had KOV. - West says nothing about -oic,, it should be noted that not even this is a certain characteristic of West-Ionie: one finds the ending only in Sicily and in Magna Graecia, in the Euboean colonies, where influence from neighbouring dialects should never be excluded (cf. what I have said 1983, 33).

iy 1987, 9. 20 Epigr. V Gow-Page = AP V 107. Bossi wrongly accuses me of having denied a link

between this passage and the one from Archilochus (Studi 108). The only thing that I have denied (for reasons expounded 1983, 32, which it is pointless to repeat) is that one may legitimately use Philodemus to reconstruct a form of 8dKV(o in Archilochus.

21 Verbs meaning 'to be able' etc. govern both the present and the aorist infinitives in general-universal sentences. It looks as if the choice depends to a large extent on other verbs in the context. Compare the following two passages from Herodotus, which I owe to P. Stork, The aspectual usage of the dynamic infinitive in Herodotus, Groningen 1982,79: III 65,3 èv yòp xqT dv0p(O7t:r|ir|i 0vcn O\JK èvfìv dpa xò (iéA.Àov ylveoGoa ànorpéneiv, IX 16,4 òxi Set yevécQai èie xotì OEOTJ àu.rJxavov ànoTpéyai àv9pcÓ7icoi.

16 SLINGS

8. However, parallels for KOCKÓV = KO:KÒ<; Xóyoq are numerous, but there is always a verb like Aiyco or ÒKOUCO in the context ", except for two passages from Sophocles ' . Thus, the idiom presupposed by Bossi may well be typically tragic 24. Nothing is proved by Archil. fr. 126, 2 xòv KOKCOC; \i' èpSovxa SEIVOÌO' àvxa|i£tp£O0at KOKOK;, where KOKOK; may, in practice, refer to insults in the extra-linguistic reality, and probably does. But its meaning is and remains simply 'evils' 25

As for my own proposai, Bossi's argument that, with àx£, the construction seems to lose its force21 is plainly circular. According to the rule 27, one may simply put uópuT|^ (not qualified by eoe, or one of its synonyms) when the predi­cate refers to an act which is typical of this animai. In itself, £Ttioxa|iai ... SOIKETV

uópur^, «as an ant, I know how to bite», is perfectly possible. But without cóq or àx£, the construction is not possible for ÈTcioxapat ... K-aK-ofJvii-upuriE,. Given the fact that I cannot accept SOCKEÌV, it becomes necessary - for me at any rate - to read àxe 28.

Bossi further claims that àxell nóp|iT|£, would be especially problematic on account of the enjambement29. True enough, I haven't found a parallel for àx£ separated by line-end from a following constituent determined by it. But since Archilochus uses other prepositive subordinators at line-end Mì, there is no reason why, at this position, he would have avoided a conjunction that determines a single constituent rather than a whole clause. In fact, this type of particle is found at this position in Pindar, Sophocles and Lycophron ?l. Given the fact that 'phrase-conjunctions' are far less frequent than 'clause-conjunctions', the absence of the former at line-end proves nothing in a corpus as small as archaic iambic poetry. It may or may not be true that the former are strictly linked with the following

" Cf. A. Th. 571; S. Ai. 1012, Ph. 65, 382, El. 288; Hdt. Vili 61, 2, IX 107, 1. 23 Ai. 1244, Ph. 374. 24 The phrase 5dKO<; ... KaKcxyopitìv (Pi. P. 2, 53), on which Bossi bases his argument,

is much more precise. I do not believe that it is an echo of our passage, although obviously it refers to Archilochus. Cf. 1983, 32.

5 In its context, my proposai KaicovJv should be likewise interpreted as referring to harming someone with insults. The echo indicated by Bossi - and the merit of having indicated it is his - is therefore independent from the precise words supplied.

26 Studi 108: «con dxe [...] si verrebbe a perdere il vigore del costrutto, dato dall'iden­tificazione con l'animale».

27 For more detailed information, cf. 1987, 9f. * This is also a valid argument against the various proposals KaKOOxo(iéeiv, tcocicoppoBéeiv,

Koocoppa^éeiv, Kaico<t>pové£iv, for which cf. 1987, 3; 9. 29 Studi 108. 10 Fr. 91, 8 òxell; Hippon, fr. * 117, 6 West = ° 196, 6 Degani (from the 'Second Strassburg

Epode', which I consider to be by Archilochus) oxicjl. 11 cóq Pi. OI. 10,17; S. El. 1123; òrco*; S. Ph. 777; Lyc. Alex. 1427.

FOR THE THIRD TIME: ARCHILOCHUS AND THE ANT 17

word, as Bossi thinks 32, but I don't see that they are ali that to a larger extent than prepositions, which the iambographers certainly place at the end of the line 33.

Amsterdam, Free University S I M O N R. S L I N G S

32 Studi 108: «strettamente uniti al termine che segue». But both types of words are prepositives, and to distinguish between prepositives according to degrees of unity with fol­lowing NPs seems hazardous, unless such a distinction is backed up by extensive research.

3 Cf. Solon fr. 36,10f. xoùc. 5' àvay»cour)c, VKÒ\\ xpeioùq <|njyóvxa<;. Of course, the so-called postpositio is not relevant to our problem.