Iliad, beginning of book 13, misc thoughts

Today, I spent most of my reading time on the beginning of book 13 of the Iliad. Things are heating up as Hektor continues his assault on the Greeks, leading up to his eventually reaching their ships. I've been using Janko's commentary, part of a 6-book commentary on the Iliad, and, sadly, I think it's the least interesting so far. Janko spends a lot of time on picayune morphological questions, whereas the other books were more focused on larger-scale poetic issues, like the use of caesuras to raise the tension of a line, and how groups of lines might work with each other.

On the other hand, I was struck by one interesting note. Homer refers to the two Ajaxes, Oilean Ajax and Telamonian Ajax, as the Aiantes, which is sometimes a bit of a mess, because they perform different functions in the army--Telamonian Ajax (big Ajax) is a huge spearman on the front lines, and Oilean Ajax (little Ajax) is more of a sling guy in the back lines--so normally there's no reason for them to be near each other. Anyways, Janko says that new research has shown that the Aiantes used to refer to big Ajax and his brother Teucrus, the same way that, say, the Castores refers to Castor and Pollux, but Homer misunderstood the formula, and brought little Ajax into a whole bunch of scenes that were originally just Teucrus and big Ajax. Not only that, but Teucrus is pretty much demoted to a hanger-on in those scenes, and little Ajax gets his part.

So, I think this sets an interesting question for a translator--if the original meaning, going far enough back has Teucrus in that role, should he be brought back or not? That's probably going a bit far, but we can see something like this in Athene's epithet "gray-eyed", which some people translate as owl-eyed, which goes closer to the original meaning. Homer himself, though, probably thought that it meant gray-eyed (or so I understand from the commentaries--I'm not sure how they figure this out!). In a syncretic piece like the Iliad, composed over a long period, I think it's an interesting question for translators whose understanding they should use--the people who invented the original formula or the people who heard it closer to the time when the poem assumed its final form.

Also been reading a bit of Fielding's Tom Jones. More on that some other time--this is long and boring enough already.