III
[60] A more detailed statement and documentation of the following analysis of the Nekyia in Od. λ will be found in Rh. Mus. 1, 600 ff. (1895). [Kl. Schr. ii, 255.]
[61] The information given by Teiresias, λ 107 ff., about Thrinakia and the cattle of Helios seems to be put in such a brief and inadequate form just because the fuller account given by Kirke, μ 127, was already known to the poet who did not wish to repeat this word for word.
[62] A final example of such pictures intended to suggest the background of the Odyssey is the conversation between Achilles and Agamemnon in the “second Nekyia”, ω 19 ff. The composer of these lines has understood quite correctly the meaning and purpose of his model, the original Nekyia of λ, though his continuation of it is certainly very clumsy.
[63] κ 539–40 is borrowed from δ 389–90, 470.—I find after writing this that Kammer had already suggested imitation of δ in the Nekyia: Einheit d. Od., 494 f.
[64] It is striking (and may have some special reason) that in Kirke’s account there is no mention of the Kimmerians. It is easier to see why the careful description of the country in Kirke’s speech, κ 509–15, is not afterwards repeated but merely recalled to the memory of the reader in a few words (λ 21–2).
[65] I can see no essential difference between the conception and situation of Hades as indicated in the Iliad and the account given in the Nekyia of the Odyssey. J. H. Voss and Nitzsch were right in this matter. Nor do the additional details given in the “second Nekyia” of ω essentially “conflict” (as Teuffel, Stud. u. Charact., thinks) with the description of the first Nekyia. It does not adhere [52] slavishly to its original, but it rests upon the same fundamental conceptions.
[66] Sch. H.Q., κ 514, Πυριφλεγέθων, ἤτοι τὸ πῦρ τὸ ἀφανίζον τὸ σάρκινον τῶν βροτῶν, cf. Apollodor., π. θεῶν, ap. Stob., Ecl. i, p. 420, 9 W. Πυριφλεγέθων εἴρηται ἀπὸ τοῦ πυρὶ φλέγεσθαι τοὺς τελευτῶντας.
[67] Acheron, too, seems to be regarded as a river. The soul of the unburied Patroklos, which has already departed, ἀν’ εὐρυπυλὲς Ἄϊδος δῶ, and has therefore passed over Okeanos, is prevented by the other souls from passing over “the river”, Ψ 72 f. This can hardly be the Okeanos, and must, therefore, be Acheron (so, too, Porph. ap. Stob., Ecl. i, p. 422 f., 426 W.). κ 515 does not in the least prove that Acheron was thought of as a lake and not a river, as Bergk, Opusc. ii, 695, thinks.
[68] Cf. λ 206 ff., 209–393 ff., 475.