01 - Meter, Meaning, and the Iliadic Augment

I shall attend to the question of the meaning of the augment in the Iliad, whether the presence or absence of the augment on past tense forms is the result of metrical or grammatical considerations. The initial problem was one of chronology. Because the unaugmented forms are linguistically older, scholars at the turn of the twentieth century debated whether the surrounding passages in the text should also be considered to be older (Bréal 1900; Drewitt 1912a-b, 1913; Shewan 1912, 1914; Beck 1919). Advances in both the understanding of oral-traditional poetry and historical linguistics have been followed by the application of new ideas to the question of the augment (Bottin 1969; Blumenthal 1974; Basset 1989; West 1989; Bakker 1999, 2006; Willi 2007). The historical origin of the augment as a particle has prompted the notion that its deictic meaning may still have been felt by Homer and the original audience of the poems. Additionally, the existence of the injunctive forms in Vedic Sanskrit, which are morphologically similar to the unaugmented forms in early Greek epic but semantically distinct has proved enticing. Most recently, Filip de Decker has argued strenuously for a pragmatic interpretation of the augment in a series of articles over the past decade (2015, 2016a-b, 2017, 2018, 2019a-e, 2020a-g, 2021, 2022).

In contrast, I emphasize the ways in which the distribution and use of the augment conform to patterns commonly known from the study of formulaic poetry. First, following Parry's argument that singers modernized their diction to its natural conclusion, there is a case to be made for restoring as many of the augments as possible in our Homeric texts (Parry 1932; Janko 2000). This idea has significant implications for the results of earlier studies, several of which depend on assuming granular distinctions of meaning. When augments are added to the text, the distribution of forms can change significantly, making some of those subtle distinctions untenable. I then move to a few brief studies of some of the most common verbs in the Iliad. Some are drawn from semantically driven contemporary scholarship, such as δίδωμι and τίθημι both of which de Decker has studied. Others, such as βάλλω and βαίνω, present new material, which consistently supports the the patterns observed in previously studied verbs. In each case, statistical evidence is presented alongside example passages to demonstrate that the presence or absence of the augment does not produce a meaningful semantic difference in the Iliad. Understanding the augmented and unaugmented forms as a series of minimal pairs differing in only one metrical element but otherwise identical in meaning allows for an improved assessment of the development of early Greek formulaic diction, and it also permits more accurate reading of one of the most important texts in world literature.

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Presenters

James Aglio, Boston University

  SCS-16