Laertes revisited

Reunited after nearly twenty years' separation, Odysseus and Penelope retire at last to bed, οἱ μὲν ἔπειτα | ἀσπάσιοι λέκτροιο παλαιοῦ θεσμὸν ἵκοντο (Od.23.295–6). This, we are told in the scholia, was for the two greatest Homeric scholars of antiquity theτέλος; of theOdyssey: τοῦτο τέλος τῆς Όδυσσείας φησὶν Άρίσταρχος καὶ Άρισιοφάνης (H, M, Q), Άρισιοφάνης δὲ καὶ Άρίσταρχος πέρας τῆς Όδυσσείας τοῦτο ποιοῦνται (M, V, Vind. 133). The interpretation of this testimony poses one of the most important problems of Homeric scholarship; Bethe did not exaggerate its significance when he wrote ‘Es hängt von der Auffassung dieses Scholions die Beurteilung unserer Homerüberlieferung überhaupt ab und mit ihr die Frage, was der Kritik gegenüber der Ilias und Odyssee erlaubt ist’. (‘The interpretation of this scholium is of vital significance for our view of the transmission of the Homeric text as a whole, and for the question of the proper limits of criticism where theIliadandOdysseyare concerned’.) Here, as all too often, we are frustrated by the abbreviated condition of theOdyssey-scholia which, as the poem draws to a close, reflect in their increasing concision the diminishing energies of those to whom we owe our knowledge of ancient Homeric scholarship,Prima facie, the note tells us that Aristophanes and Aristarchus took 23.296 as the limit of theOdyssey; this is commonly understood to mean that they judged the Epilogue to be unhomeric, but this interpretation is not free from difficulty, and some have maintained that the note represents aesthetic criticism.