ABSTRACT
The most important conclusion of Risch’s linguistic study for our purposes is that the normal vowel contractions and the loss of digamma belong to the period after 900. Among the vowel contractions are the new genitives of the a stems and 0 stems, case-endings which have interested us already.2 The forms which in Mycenaean were disyllabic (-ao, -aon, -oio) are written in Homer texts -ea) (more rarely -co), -ecov (more rarely -cov), -ov, when they are scanned as monosyllables. In Attica3 in the middle of the eighth century the genitive plural, of the a stems was written -on ; it was written and scanned monosyllabically; the same inscription also shows that the digamma was neither written nor scanned in Athens at this time. In the inscription of the third quarter of the
eighth century from Ischia1 the -ou genitive is written -o not only where it must be scanned -ou but in two other positions where in Homer we should be tempted to substitute -oo and -oio. Moreover, i f i e g o g aiQTjoei presupposes the Homeric formula IjueQog a lq e l , which involves vowel contraction. A seventh-century inscription from Delos2 on a dedication by a Naxian writes the a stem genitives -rjo and -tjov, the o stem genitive -0, and an s stem geni tive -eog, but scans them all monosyllabically. The chief interest of these inscriptions is to show how the earliest text of Homer is likely to have been written, but they also confirm the evidence of our late texts of Hesiod, the Cyclic poets, and the earliest elegiac poetry as to poetic usage from the middle of the eighth to the middle of the seventh century. Where do the Iliad and the Odyssey come in this series?
