Monday, October 24, 2022
Inappropriate Adjectives
Frederick M. Combellack, "Two Blameless Homeric Characters,"
American Journal of Philology 103.4 (Winter, 1982) 361-372 (at 361; footnote omitted):
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A familiar feature of Homer's use of adjectives is what has come to be called the "generic" use. The adjective refers to what the character or the phenomenon is habitually, even though the word may be irrelevant or even inappropriate on a given occasion. The clothes of the Phaeacian royal family are "bright" even when they are dirty clothes on their way to the laundry (Od. 6.74). Aphrodite is laughter-loving even when she is in great pain and complaining to her mother about the wound that Diomedes has given her (Iliad 5.375).
These occasional inappropriate adjectives created a problem for the Homerists of antiquity, and they devised a solution (attributed in the scholia to Aristarchus). Their λύσις was: οὐ τότε ἀλλὰ φύσει "not at that time, but by nature."
