B356, Z326 and A404

Extract

1. In B354–6 Nestor, encouraging the Greeks to fight on, says

τῶ μή τις πρὶν έπειγέσθω οἶκόνδε νέεσθαι,

πρίν τινα πὰρ Τρώων ἀλόχω κατακοιμηθῆναι,

τίσασθαι δ' Ἑλένης ὁρμήματά τε στοναχάς τε.

‘So let no one be eager to return home, before he has slept with a Trojan's wife and avenged….’ Avenged what? Obviously the rape of Helen. The Greeks are to do to the wives of the Trojans what Paris did to the wife of Menelaus. So they will avenge the ὁρμήματα and στοναχάς of Helen.

It is difficult to believe, reading this passage, that in this country the normal, accepted interpretation of 1. 356 is that the Greeks are to avenge their own ‘cares’ (=μελεδήματα?) and groans for Helen's sake. In fact, that Ἑλένης is taken as an objective genitive. This strange interpretation has the authority of Aristarchus and is found, for example, in Leaf, Monro, and Liddell and Scott.

Aristarchus seems to have produced his explanation in a literary dispute with the Chorizontes. They put forward the view that this was a difference between the attitude of the Iliad and the Odyssey: that the poet of the Iliad makes Helen an unwilling victim, while in the Odyssey she went willingly with Paris. To counter this argument, Aristarchus produced his alternative interpretation of B 356. Most of us are Chorizontes now; why, then, should we repeat from generation to generation a forced interpretation which was conceived for the narrow purpose of literary polemics?