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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
In the following pages I shall emend or explain certain passages of the Epyllion. For the sake of brevity I shall refer the reader, wherever possible, to the material collected by Breitenstein, whose monograph I have recently reviewed. The conoscenti will hardly need to be reminded, for the purposes of my discussion, that the author of Megara was, to appropriate Geffcken's words, '‘ein doctus poeta, wie alle Alexandriner’ (Leon., p. 140), steeped in the knowledge of Homer, Apollonius, and Theocritus (especially Idyll 25). First of all, an emendation.
page 181 note 1 Breitenstein, T., Recherches sur le poème Mégara, Copenhagen, 1966.Google Scholar
page 181 note 2 Line 67 (cf. Breitenstein, p. 51) is sound. Nobody seems to have noticed that 
(for the sedes of 
cf. Ap. Rh. 2. 862, 3. 709) is closely paralleled by 
Ap. Rh. 4. 1432 f.; if we take 
as circumstantial, with Mooney (‘in your distress’), we can accept Legrand's interpretation of (‘au milieu des peines que nous souffrons’); on the other hand, the meaning of 
is probably final (= ‘in order to help us to overcome our distress’, cf. Oswald, , The Use of Prep, in Ap. Rh., p. 181Google Scholar; Haggett, , A Comparison of Apollonius Rhodius with Homer, p. 45Google Scholar), which meaning would add a fine touch of reproachfulness to Alcmena's words (‘he would be a great moaner who would list our troubles in order to help us to overcome them’).
page 181 note 3 The imperative 
(cf. especially Ellendt, Lex. Soph., s.v. 
; frequent attestations in the Tragedians) is in itself equivalent to 
, cf. Ap. Rh. 1. 300. It is usually followed by a comforting piece of news, which will help the person addressed to 
his or her present plight, but sometimes 
is followed by an unpalatable and unavoidable truth, which the person addressed is exhorted (
is an imperative) to 
. The exhortation is ironic in Hymn. Horn. Merc. 301 (where Radermacher, ad loc, entirely misses the irony), serious in Megara 68 and in the inscriptional attestations indicated above. On consolatory 
and 
cf. Lattimore, , Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs, Urbana, 1962, pp. 250–4.Google Scholar
page 181 note 4 
, in line 100 of Megara, ‘provient de l'Hymne homérique à Hermès’ (Breitenstein, p. 87); on the Homeric hymns echoed by Hellenistic poets cf. Hermes, 1968,
p. 75. Whether such echoes are derived recta via from Homer, or from intermediaries now lost, is impossible to say.
page 181 note 5 ‘Wouldn't it really be better to get rid of 
altogether, given Theocr. 2. 161, 17. 102, 24. 79, 24. 118? I must say that in writing Greek I would tend to have no connective of any kind if I were beginning a sentence with a demonstrative word immediately after a command’ (Professor Dover, private communication).
page 182 note 1 The wording in Megara 
may well be a formal echo of Hom. Il. 15. 254 
Cf. also Od. 4. 325 f.; 
in Il. 15. 254 may have been taken to mean 
, in which case the echo would be not merely formal.
page 182 note 2 The participial form 
, suspected by Hermann and Meineke (the latter wanted to doricize it into 
), is defended (cf. also Or. Sib. 5. 505 
, same sedes, and Hes. 
Erg. 429 alongside 
Erg. 22) by such participles as 
Ap. Rh. 1. 614 (alongside 
iv. 489): cf. Rzach, , Gramm. St. zu Ap. Rh., p. 588,Google Scholar where it must be added that such forms were evidently felt as ‘Ionisms’, cf. 
Herod. 4. 19.
page 182 note 3 Cf. the Callimachean joke 
(Hymn 4. 66), which I have explained in Rhein. Mus. 1967, p. 53; for the 
(Hymn 4. 274, cf. 275 f., 
… 
, cf. Kuiper, , Stud. Callim. i, pp. 177 f.Google Scholar
page 182 note 4 For a discussion on the suitability of 
to Thebes cf. Breitenstein, p. 48, where it must be added that 
implies fertility of the soil, cf. Plut. Mor. 49 c 
, Diosc. 4. 15 
.
page 183 note 1 For a similar case (two attestations of 
supporting each other) cf. C.Q. N.s. xvii (1967), p. 89.Google Scholar
page 183 note 2 Herodianus (quoted by Baale, , op. cit., p. 98Google Scholar) quotes the form 
alongside 
: ‘the explanation may be that at least at Athens from early s. IV the diphthongs 
were pronounced alike, as constant confusion in inscriptions shows, and this may well have become general in the Greek world by the end of s. IV. From this it might result that the diphthongs 
would also be treated as interchangeable’ (Professor Dover, private communication).
page 183 note 3 Cf. also Theocr. 25. 82, 22. 70. The author of Megara may, of course, have been one of those who spelt with 
the aorists and futures of the type in question, cf. Legrand's apparatus.
page 184 note 1 The substitution of the metrically orthodox 
eliminated from the line of Megara the rare Hellenistic metrical feature represented by the scanning 
.
page 184 note 2 The schema atticum is violated by the author of Megara also in line 56: cf. Breiten-stein, , op. cit., p. 76.Google Scholar To eliminate it in line 63, it would have sufficed to write 
page 184 note 3 For 
‘spin’ cf. LSJ, s.v. 2, Kaibel, Epigr., Index, s.v.; also Thes., s.v.: perfect passive forms not unusual in the sense ‘quae fato destinantur’.
page 184 note 4 Cf. also KB ii, p. 425, s.v. 
The parallelism (
attached to dental stems in 
) is obvious: whether the author of Megara was directly inspired by his model Apollonius, or whether both poets are independently employing a Hellenistic morphological feature, cannot be decided. The endings 
tended to be felt in Alexandrian epic as singular, cf. KB ii, p. 78, 8 with Anmerkung.
page 184 note 5 Textual critics should always be on the alert against trivialization of Hellenistic morphological rarities: Apollonius' 
(4. 1686) is trivialized in one MS. into 
(cf. C.Q., 1967, p. 97, n. 2Google Scholar): it is, in reality, a beautiful specimen of Ionism (cf. Hippocrates' 
, quoted in KB i, p. 346); the imperative 
in A.P. 5. 53 (52). 4 is, as I have shown (Eranos, 1967, p. 41Google Scholar), a Hellenistic form, and the same is the case with 
in A.P. 5. 191. 4; Callimachus' 
is, of course, a grammatical joke (Rhein. Mus., loc. cit.).