Notes on inscriptions: Nikandre's Central Ionic

ID 2 (= LSAG 303, 2; Buck, no. 6; Colvin, no. 23), a specimen of 7th-c. BC Central Ionic. The Anne Jeffery Archive offers a very full range of materials. The text of the inscription is presented in the Beazley Archive and details of the monument by the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge (whose cast is depicted below).

→Νικάνδρη μ’ ἀνέθε̄κεν ℎ(ε)κηβόλο̄ι ἰοχεαίρηι | ϟο̄́ρη Δεινο-
←δίκη̆ο̄ το̑ Ναℎσίο̄ ἔℎ3σοχος ἀλ(λ)ή̆ο̄ν | Δεινομένεος δὲ κασιγνε̄́τη
→Φℎράℎσο̄  δ’ ἄλοχος μ[ήν?].

ℎ(ε)κηβόλ- (cf. Il.1.14 of Apollo) was originally ϝεκᾰ-βόλ- (cf. ἕκων and σάφα: see the Mantiklos dedication to Apollo). The metrical lengthening to allow its use in a hexameter (by eliminatyed a run of three light syllables) must predate the Attic-Ionic change of */a:/ to /æ:/ (see below) and then to /ε:/. That is, the long vowel arose early enough to be treated as an original or inherited /a:/. The epithet (ϝ)ἑκα(ϝ)εργος (Il.1.147, etc.) required no such lengthening because there was no run of three light syllables.

Of course, ἰοχέαιρα an epithet of Artemis is passim in Homer. Apart from two instances (Il.20.71 after Ἄρτεμις, Il.21.480 νείκεσεν), it is always, as here, the last word in its line. In Il.9.538 and Od.6.102, 11.198 , as here, Artemis is not named.

Although masculine ἔξοχος ἄλλων ends plenty of hexameters in Homer and in related poetry, its Ionic feminine form ἔξοχος ἀλλέων is only found here. AR.4.792 has what would be an earlier feminine form at the opening of a hexameter: ἔξοχον ἀλλά̄ων. Call.Art.189 is signficantly different.

κασιγνε̄́τη shows, in a single word, epsilon for the inherited long e vowel and eta for the (Central) Ionic outcome (/æ:/) of the inherited long a vowel. At length Νικάνδρη μ’ ἀνέθε̄κεν shows the same phenomenon. Later inscriptions use eta for vowels of both origins. Cf., albeit a supplement, [τὰ̄ν κασιγ]νήτᾱν in Sapph.5.9. (See ZPE 189 (2014) 11 for the corroboration provided by the 2014 discovery: ' τὰ̄ν κασιγ . [ '.

On the -ηο and -ηων a-stem genitive endings, Geoffrey Horrocks noted (1987: 281-282n. 35) [the original macra have been replaced with : as a marker of a long vowel]:

"No length distinctions are represented graphically, with E spelling /ε/, /ε:/ and /e:/ [ἀνέθε̄κεν = ἀνέθηκεν], O spelling /o/, /ɔ:/ and /o:/>[ℎ(ε)κηβόλο̄ι = ἑκηβόλωι; το̑ Ναℎσίο̄  = τοῦ Ναξίου], so there is no reason to think that H is being used exclusively to represent /æ:/; it was presumably also used to represent the shortened form of this sound that resulted from quantitative metathesis. In other words, the spelling -ΗΟ(Ν) almost | certainly represents a sequence of short vowell plus long vowel run together in pronunciation by synizesis exactly equivalent to the conventional -εω(ν) of Ionic literary texts. There can be no question of forms without quantitative metathesis surviving in the sixth century in spoken Ionic (cf. note 32), or, given the developmments that place in the epic tradition as evidenced by Homer, in literary Ionic.".

There is no example of spelling /e:/, but there are Δεινο|δίκη̆ο̄  and Δεινομένεος with the genuine diphthong seen in δεινός < *dwei-no-. Cf. gen.sg. Δ̣ϝε(ι)νία in IG IV 358 see (also Anne Jeffrey's materials and Buck, no. 91]

Note that Nikandre's father and brother have names with the same first element: δεινο-. Her name is unique, as is her father's, but her brother's name had a good innings. Her husband's name, Phraxos, is also unique.

Compensatory Lengthening

In δουλιχόδειρος (Il.2.460 and 15.692 and quotations etc. thereof), the -ου- is artificial (consider all the Homeric compound adjectives in δολιχο-; there was never a /w/ to necessitate any lengthening), but the -ει- is the regular outcome of compensatory lengthening in Ionic (cf. Attic δέρη, Aeolic δέρᾱ, Arcadian δεϝρά̄ (BCH 39 (1915) 53-97 = Schwyzer 664 = IPArk. 14, lines 14, 15, 18, 24: Orchomenos), Ionic δειρή).

Cf. δουλιχόεις in Anth.6.4 (neut.pl., by Leonidas). LSJ labels both forms 'Ion.', which is untrue for the second adjective and only half-true for the first.

Fermor on the verbal music of Greece

This recent posting by Laudator Temporis Acti deserves to be echoed here.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (London: John Murray, 1966), Chapter VI (Sounds of the Greek World):

The seas of Greece are the Odyssey whose music we can never know: the limitless sweep and throb of prosody, the flux and reflux of hexameters scanned by winds and currents and accompanied, for its escort of accents, 

for the fall of its dactyls
the calm of spondees
the run of tribrachs
the ambiguity of trochees
and the lash of anapests;
for the flexibility of accidence,
the congruence of syntax
and the confluence of its crasis;
for the fluctuating of enclitic and proclitic,
for the halt of caesurae and the flight of the digamma,
for the ruffle of hard and soft breathings,
for its liquid syllables and the collusion of diphthongs,
for the receding tide of proparoxytones,
and the hollowness of perispomena stalactitic with subscripts,
for the inconsequence of anacolouthon,
the economy of synecdoche,
the compression of hendiadys
and the extrvagance of its epithets,
for the embrace of zeugma,
for the abruptness of asyndeton
for the swell of hyperbole
and the challenge of apostrophe,
for the splash and the boom and the clamour and
the echo and the murmur of onomatopoeia

by the

islands and harbours and causeways and soundings and crescents of shingle, whirlpools and bays and lagoons and narrows and chasms and roadsteads, seismic upheavals of crags in the haze of dying volcanoes; islets lying in pale archipelagos, gulfs, reefs and headlands, warrened with cavities, that end in a litter of rocks and spikes where the limestone goes dark at sunset; thunderbolt sea-marks scattered on the water, light in the reign of the Pleiades, slowly spinning the sea-sounds that sigh in the caves of solitary islands.

~Typoios