Laudator Temporis Acti

Bryan Hainsworth, The Iliad: A Commentary, Volume III: Books 9-12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; rpt. 2000), pp. 6-7:

A true hapax legomenon seems to present a special problem for those who believe that the techniques of composition used in the Homeric poems are mainly those of oral poetry. The techniques of oral poetry are generic and formular, the hapax legomenon by definition is not. It may not even bear any relation of sound, sense, or form to the formular part of the diction, and it would be gratuitous and implausible to claim that more than a handful make their sole appearances by chance. On the contrary, hapax legomena, being an aspect of the vitality of the Kunstsprache, and of the willingness of ἀοιδοί to experiment with their lexicon, must be accommodated in any satisfactory account of Homeric diction.⁵ Here then the question is how hapax legomena can be deployed in a sentence otherwise made up of formular elements by a composer who relies heavily on such elements. When it is put in that way the problem posed by a hapax legomenon for the singer is not radically different from that posed by an otherwise unused grammatical form of a regular part of his lexicon. The unique grammatical form will indeed bring with it the verbal associations of the regular forms, but since the associated words and phrases would be built around the particular metrical shape of the regular forms they are likely to be as much a hindrance as a help in handling the unusual form.

The scale of the problem presented by true hapax legomena and by many uniquely occurring grammatical forms is quite serious. The printed text of the Iliad is made up of some 111,500 words, i.e. segments of text marked off by verse-ends or spaces, or about 63,000 if particles, pronouns, and prepositions are ignored. Many of these 'words' are repeated, but about 11,000, or more than one in six, are found once only. About 2,000 of them according to M. Pope are true hapaxes, lexical items occurring just once in the poem.<sup>6

5</sup> See M.M. Kumpf, Four Indices of the Homeric Hapax Legomena (Hildesheim 1984) for statistics, N.J. Richardson in Bremer, HBOP 165-84, for argument, Edwards, vol. v 53-5. Edwards concludes his discussion of hapax legomena with these words: '[Homer] was also completely at ease in employing in his verse words which are not only non-formular but which must be considered (on our limited evidence) foreign to the usual epic vocabulary.' M. Pope, CQ 35 (1985) 1-8, draws attention to new coinages in Homer.

⁶ 'Word' is used here as a publisher might speak of a 'book of 80,000 words'. The composer's vocabulary or lexicon of course is very much shorter: ἔγχος is one entry in the lexicon but supplies 205 'words' to the text of the Iliad. Statistics are mine. I am indebted to the Revd A.Q. Morton, formerly of the University of Edinburgh, for making available to me computerized word-lists and indices.

HBOP = Homer: Beyond Oral Poetry, edd. J.M. Bremer, I.J.F. de Jong, and J. Kalff (Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner Publishing Co., 1987).