Book 8
6.5
And in the first place let me mention in how many ways the term “Argos” is used by the poet, not only by itself but also with epithets, when he calls Argos “Achaean,” or “Iasian,” or “hippian,”But this epithet (ἵππιον, “land of horses”) is not applied to Argos anywhere in the Iliad or the Odyssey. Pindar so uses it once, in Pind. I. 7.17 or “Pelasgian,” or “horse-pasturing.”e.g., Hom. Il. 2.287 For, in the first place, the city is called Argos: “Argos and Sparta,”Hom. Il. 4.52“and those who held Argos and Tiryns.”Hom. Il. 2.559And, secondly, the Peloponnesus: “in our home in Argos,”Hom. Il. 1.30for the city of Argos was not hisAgamemnon’s. home. And, thirdly, Greece as a whole; at any rate, he calls all Greeks Argives, just as he calls them Danaans and Achaeans. However, he differentiates identical names by epithets, calling Thessaly “Pelasgian Argos”: “Now all, moreover, who dwelt in Pelasgian Argos;”Hom. Il. 2.681Hom. Il. 2.681 and calling the Peloponnesus “Achaean Argos.” “And if we should come to Achaean Argos,”Hom. Il. 9.141“Or was he not in Achaean Argos?”3.251And here he signifies that under a different designation the Peloponnesians were also called Achaeans in a special sense. And he calls the Peloponnesus “Iasian Argos”: “If all the Achaeans throughout Iasian Argos could see”Source unknown Penelope, she would have still more wooers; for it is not probable that he meant the Greeks from all Greece, but only those that were near. But the epithets “horse-pasturing” and “hippian” he uses in a general sense.
