ACTA CLASSICA LXI (2018) 201-211 ISSN 0065-1141

‘I WILL SEND HIM TO CRETE, AND SANDY PYLOS.’ A

FRAGMENT OF THE CYPRIA IN THE HOMERIC SCHOLIA?

Benjamin Sammons
Eugene, Oregon, USA

At Odyssey 3.313-28, Nestor warns Telemachus not to prolong his absence

from home, lest the suitors completely destroy his property, and advises the
young man only to travel to Sparta in case Menelaus, who has arrived home
quite recently, may have news of Odysseus. Nestor’s admonition: ‘tarry not,
but travel to Sparta and then return home,’ may have struck some ancient
readers as needless, since this was Telemachus’ plan all along. Or was it? One
scholion claims that the passage ‘convinced Zenodotus to substitute “Crete”
for “Sparta” in all passages about Telemachus’s journey’1 and goes on to cite
alternative lines for 1.93 and 1.285 with just this change. Line 1.93: πέμψω
δ’ ἐς Σπάρτην τε καὶ ἐς Πύλον ἠμαθόεντα (‘I will send him to Sparta and
sandy Pylos’), becomes πέμψω δ’ ἐς Κρήτην τε καὶ ἐς Πύλον ἠμαθόεντα (‘I
will send him to Crete and sandy Pylos’). Line 1.285: κεῖθεν δὲ Σπάρτηνδε
παρὰ ξανθὸν Μενέλαον (‘then to Sparta and blond Menelaus’), becomes
κεῖθεν δ’ ἐς Κρήτην τε παρ’ Ἰδομενῆα ἄνακτα (‘then to Crete and lord
Idomeneus’).2 I quote lines 1.284-86 below for the full context.

πρῶτα μὲν ἐς Πύλον ἐλθὲ καὶ εἴρεο Νέστορα δῖον,

κεῖθεν δὲ Σπάρτηνδε παρὰ ξανθὸν Μενέλαον·

1 Schol. HM on 3.313: οὗτος ὁ τόπος ἀνέπεισε Ζηνόδοτον ἐν τοῖς περὶ τῆς

ἀποδημίας Τηλεμάχου διόλου τὴν Κρήτην ἀντὶ τῆς Σπάρτης ποιεῖν. For text and
notes see Pontani 2010 ad loc.
2 1.93a-b (κεῖθεν δ’ ἐς Κρήτην τε παρ’ Ἰδομενῆα ἄνακτα / ὃς γὰρ δεύτατος ἦλθεν

Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων = 1.285 (Zen.)-286) would seem to be a later attempt to

accommodate a plan to visit Crete within Telemachus’ real itinerary (i.e. he was to
go to Crete after Pylos and Sparta). Among other problems, the phrase ‘from there’
is very awkward, since the Pylos of line 1.93 is the second part of a hysteron proteron,
and there is really no way Idomeneus could be said to have arrived home last of the
Achaeans. The lines are obviously constructed from 1.285-86, where Menelaus is
correctly described as the last-arriving Achaean. See Heubeck et al. 1988:87. As I
suggest below, the allegedly Zenodotean variant of 1.285 may actually have been
invented by the interpolator of 1.93a-b.

DOI 10.15731/AClass.061.10 201

 ὃς γὰρ δεύτατος ἦλθεν Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων.
(1.284-86)
First go to Pylos and question godlike Nestor,
then to Sparta and blond Menelaus.
For he [Menelaus] was the last of the bronze-clad Achaeans to come
home.

According to the view ascribed to Zenodotus, Athena intended Telema-

chus to travel from Pylos to Crete in order to inquire about his father from
Idomeneus. This was the plan she proposed to Zeus (1.93), this her com-
mand to the young hero (1.284-85). Nestor, having heard about this itine-
rary ‘offstage’, dissuades Telemachus from the lengthy journey to Crete and
successfully redirects him to Sparta and Menelaus.3 The proposed journey
to Crete then never takes place.
As Stephanie West notes (2003:304), the detailed explication of Zen-
odotus’ reasoning is mere guesswork, since Zenodotus left no commentary.
In fact, it seems as though a minor difficulty concerning 3.313 (that is, why
Nestor should advise a course of action already resolved upon) is exploited
to craft an explanation for some very strange variants for 1.93 and 1.285, in
what ancient scholars took to be the edition of Zenodotus. Yet it is fanciful
to suppose that Zenodotus introduced such problematic variants to deal
with such an easy problem,4 and there is no evidence that Zenodotus or
anyone else tried to change the text systematically, as the scholion alleges.5
Moreover, the whole explanation reflects a misunderstanding of exactly
what Zenodotus bequeathed to his successors; for while ancient scholars
seem to have imagined that Zenodotus created something like a critical
edition of his own, the many eccentricities attributed to this ‘edition’ suggest
that it was merely a personal copy whose variants were wrongly interpreted
as Zenodotus’ own conjectures.6 The question that should be asked, then, is

3 So the scholion: οἴεται [sc. Zenodotus] γὰρ ἐκ τούτων τῶν λόγων κατὰ τὸ
σιωπώμενον ἀκηκοέναι τὸν Νέστορα παρὰ τοῦ Τηλεμάχου ὅτι καὶ ἀλλαχόσε ἐπὶ
τοῦ πατρὸς πευσόμενος παρεσκεύαστο πλεῖν (‘For Zenodotus supposes from these
words that Nestor has heard from Telemachus “offstage” that he has prepared to
sail also to another place in order to learn about his father’). On the phrase κατὰ τὸ
σιωπώμενον (‘offstage’) see Nünlist 2009:157-64.
4 It seems obvious that Nestor does not know Telemachus’ further plans and

spontaneously gives advice coinciding with Athena’s design (cf. HM on 3.317).

5 No substitution of ‘Crete’ for ‘Sparta’ is recorded for 2.214, 327, 359. In fact, the

argument attributed to Zenodotus is so weak that it looks very much like a straw
man, set up to be demolished along with the variants that it supposedly justified.
6 S. West 1981:173; cf. S. West 2003:305. It is usually supposed that Zenodotus

worked with a carefully selected copy as his base text (on this basic theory see

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not why Zenodotus ‘wrote’ these lines in his edition of the Odyssey, but
why these lines should have appeared in the copy that he happened to use,
and exactly how they appeared there. And this is an important question,
because the variant readings are perhaps the strangest in the whole textual
tradition of Homer, since they involve a major narrative signpost but com-
pletely contradict the course of the action.7
Indeed, the variants are so inappropriate to the context of our Odyssey
that it seems almost impossible that they reflect an alteration by Zenodotus
or anyone else, and it has been argued paradoxically that they must therefore
represent ‘the genuine original text’ of the Odyssey.8 Yet this could only
mean an Odyssey in which Telemachus did visit Crete on Athena’s advice.9
This is not so outlandish as it may, at first, seem. It has long been noticed
that Crete is very frequently mentioned in the Odyssey, not so much in the
direct narrative as in the lying tales of Odysseus, who repeatedly claims to
be a native of Crete or to have visited there. These lying tales reveal a surpri-
singly accurate topographical and ethnographic knowledge of Crete.10 Stran-
ger still, even Eumaeus has heard a story, from a source other than Odysseus,
locating Odysseus in Crete (14.379-85). And yet the ‘real’ adventures of the
hero include no visit to Crete. These considerations and others11 have given
rise to the theory of a ‘Cretan Odyssey,’ that is, some earlier or alternative
version of the Odyssey in which the hero’s wanderings carried him not

Montanari 1998:4-8), but M. West 2002 suggested that even this may have been
nothing more than a rhapsode’s copy brought by the scholar from his native
Ephesus.
7 Cf. Heubeck et al. 1988:87: ‘the strangest and perhaps the most significant of

Zenodotean variants’; S. West 1996:27: ‘the most disconcertingly suggestive of all

ancient Homeric variants’; Tsagalis 2012:315-16: ‘astounding oddity of these
readings’.
8 M. West 1998:100.
9 The compromise position attributed to Zenodotus, according to which Tele-

machus originally intended to visit Crete, but was redirected by Nestor, cannot be
right, for it presupposes that a divine plan conceived by Athena and approved by
Zeus was abandoned on the suggestion of a mere mortal, while Athena herself
stands by. If there were a version of the Odyssey in which Athena said ‘I will send
Telemachus to Crete’ and then so commanded the young man, he must certainly
have gone to Crete.
10 Reece 1994:159-60.
11 Other considerations, less compelling on their own, include the strangely inap-

posite proem of the Odyssey (which seems to allude to real-life rather than
wondrous adventures) and the rather awkward role of Theoclymenus (who seems
quite extraneous to the story of our Odyssey, but could be a hold-over from the
Cretan version).

203
through the supernatural wonderland of his Odyssean adventures, but
through the very real places of Crete, Thrinacia and Thesprotia. In this
alternative version, Telemachus may have been directed to Crete by Athena
in order to find, not news of his father, but his actual father, and may even
have returned home in his father’s company. The poet of our Odyssey (so
the theory goes) has supplanted this whole account with the now well-
known ‘adventures of Odysseus’ as narrated by the hero himself, while the
lying tales of Odysseus within the Homeric Odyssey represent a vestige of,
indeed a rather piquant allusion to, the competing tradition of Odysseus’
‘real’ Cretan adventures.12
How did these lines, belonging to a Cretan Odyssey, find their way into
our poem? One theory has it that the poet, intending originally to have
Telemachus search for (and find) his father on Crete, changed his plan mid-
composition, but forgot to revise the lines in question. 13 According to others
the Cretan Odyssey was a distinct poem, perhaps earlier than or parallel
with our Odyssey.14 Such an alternative version of the Odyssey may have
had an influence on whoever produced, dictated or marked up Zenodotus’
copy, perhaps a rhapsode who was accustomed to sing the Cretan Odyssey
as well as Homer’s.15 And so the lines crept into the textual tradition of the
latter, to be falsely interpreted by an uncomprehending posterity as a mis-
guided reading of Zenodotus. Of the two basic theories the second is by far
the more probable, that is, that the Cretan Odyssey was a separate work.16
If I may take the argument a step further, this amounts to saying that the
variant lines are fragments of a lost Greek epic.

12 See Woodhouse 1930:126-36; Hardie 1976:138-40. For the fullest presentation

of the argument in the light of oral theory, see Reece 1994. The same point is argued
more particularly on the basis of the variant lines by S. West 1981 and Heubeck et
al. 1988:43. The basic idea of an alternative, ‘Cretan’, Odyssey is endorsed by
Burkert 2001:127-35; Danek 1998:48-49; Griffin 2004:25-26; Nagy 2004:39;
Levaniouk 2012:374-75; cautious appraisal in Grossardt 1998:40-43. Tsagalis 2012:
313-16 buttresses the case by showing that the Cretan tales have, in aggregate, a
form very evocative of large-scale epic composition.
13 S. West 1981:173; Burkert 2001:136-37; M. West 2014:108.
14 Earlier poem: Reece 1994; Danek 1998:48-49. Parallel tradition: Nagy 2004:39;

Tsagalis 2012; Levaniouk 2012.

15 As suggested by S. West in a more recent publication (2003:305).
16 The first idea, that the poet changed his plan in the middle of composing the

Odyssey, is based on an anachronistic ‘scripsist’ idea of how poetic composition

worked in early epic. Without denying that the poet may have worked with a script,
he surely knew his whole poem by heart before undertaking to create one (not, like
a modern novelist, changing the story at will as he went along).

204
 This is an exciting possibility, but there are some difficulties with the
theory, not least of which is the fact that this alternative version of the
Odyssey is nowhere attested, and in fact seems completely unknown to any
ancient source. Sources that routinely cite Cyclic and other early epics, now
lost to us, never mention a Cretan Odyssey.17 This may indicate simply that
the latter never achieved permanent textualisation, but it must be noted
that the ancient sources sometimes reflect alternative mythologies outside
of the literary tradition proper, for example, epichoric Ithacan traditions
surrounding the homecoming of Odysseus,18 but still never mention the
supposed Cretan adventures of Odysseus. Yet according to the theory, the
tradition of the Cretan Odyssey ought to have been sufficiently widespread
that the Odyssey-poet could allude to it in a series of heavily ironic passages,
as, indeed, he alludes to the traditions underlying poems like the Nostoi,
Little Iliad and Aethiopis; and then must have remained sufficiently vigorous
(at least as a ‘performance tradition’, if not as a text) long enough to create
confusion in a personal or rhapsodic copy of the Odyssey in the age of
Zenodotus. How could it then have disappeared so utterly from memory?19
And if we are entitled to suppose that these lines come from some other
poem than Homer’s Odyssey, why restrict ourselves to the elusive Cretan
Odyssey?
In fact, there is a well-attested epic poem that was at one time attributed
to Homer, that was widely read at least down to Hellenistic times, and that
featured a hero travelling to Crete, most probably at divine behest, on a
journey very likely to include a stop-over in Nestor’s Pylos: the Cypria. The
Cypria narrated the elopement of Helen with Paris, to whom she had been
promised by Aphrodite. Naturally, this transaction required that Menelaus

17 Such sources include those preserved indirectly in the Homeric scholia, which
clearly show no knowledge of a Cretan Odyssey; otherwise they would certainly
have mentioned it in connection with the lying tales, if not in connection with the
variants themselves.
18 Cf. Malkin 1998:126-31.
19 Some cite Dictys Cretensis, or Malalas, ‘who was using a fuller version of Dictys

than we have’ (Hardie 1976:138), as relying on a version of the Cretan Odyssey.

But it is hard to believe that a poem could have escaped notice for so many centuries
and then become a major source for a figure like Dictys, who no doubt had his own
reasons for placing Odysseus in Crete and sufficient basis for such a narrative in the
lying tales themselves; cf. Grossardt 1998:39-40. Reece himself is sceptical (1994:
166-69). Perhaps the strongest argument for the existence of the poem is Tsagalis’s
painstaking demonstration that Odysseus’ Cretan adventures have, in many striking
ways, deep affinities to the traditional compositional structure of the Homeric
epics; but it may be natural for inset narratives, or even complexes of inset narrative,
to display such a traditional form, without necessarily reflecting real poems.

205
be gotten out of the way, and according to the Cypria and other accounts
he travelled to Crete, leaving his Trojan guest in the hands of his wife. So
Proclus, in the summary of the poem that constitutes our most compre-
hensive account of its content: ‘After this [the arrival of Paris] Menelaus sails
to Crete, ordering Helen to offer the guests everything they need until they
leave. At this point Aphrodite brings Helen and Alexander together .’20
Apollodorus, whose account may also reflect the Cyclic epic, offers more
details as to the motive for Menelaus’ journey: ‘Alexander was entertained
by Menelaus for nine days, but on the tenth Menelaus went to perform
obsequies for his mother’s father Catreus, and Alexander persuaded Helen
to go off with him.’21
Did Menelaus just happen to choose this moment to travel to Crete?
Was it by chance that precisely at this moment he learned of his grand-
father’s death or (if the death was already known to him) first took thought
of obsequies? Or was a god involved? Apollodorus doesn’t mention any, but
he also elides the role of Aphrodite in bringing Helen and Alexander
together. In any case, the Cypria was overfull with divine plans. Menelaus’
absence was necessary for Aphrodite’s scheme to deliver Helen to Paris, but
this was also part of a master plan of Zeus to bring about the Trojan War.22
It seems far more likely, then, that some divinity arranged for Menelaus to
be absent. Of course, Menelaus could not simply be ordered to go on vaca-
tion, so the death of Catreus would provide the temporal side of a classic
‘double determination’. It would simply be a matter of a divine messenger
reporting Catreus’ death to Menelaus, or, if the death were already known,
reproaching him with his neglect of the obsequies and sending him on his
way.
‘I will send him to Crete, and sandy Pylos.’ Who could have spoken this
line? Perhaps Aphrodite, explaining to her protégé Paris how the obstacle
will be removed. Or perhaps Zeus to some other divinity, explaining how
he plans to abet Aphrodite’s efforts in secret.

20 καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα Μενέλαος εἰς Κρήτην ἐκπλεῖ, κελεύσας τὴν Ἑλένην τοῖς ξένοις τὰ
ἐπιτήδεια παρέχειν, ἕως ἂν ἀπαλλαγῶσιν. ἐν τούτῳ δὲ Ἀφροδίτη συνάγει τὴν
Ἑλένην τῷ Ἀλεξάνδρῳ … (Cypria arg. 14-17 Bernabé 1996).
21 ἐφ’ ἡμέρας δ’ ἐννέα ξενισθεὶς παρὰ Μενελάῳ, τῇ δεκάτῃ πορευθέντος εἰς Κρήτην

ἐκείνου κηδεῦσαι τὸν μητροπάτορα Κατρέα, πείθει τὴν Ἑλένην ἀπαγαγεῖν σὺν
ἑαυτῷ (Epit. 3.3 Frazer 1921). On the overall reliability of Proclus, and the practice
of supplementing his information from Apollodorus, see my discussion in Sammons
2017:225-38.
22 For the importance of this ‘plan of Zeus’ for the poem as a whole, and the likely

ironic inflection of the passage under discussion, see Sammons 2017:95-97, 187-88.

206
 Why should Pylos, if it were a mere way station, have been specifically
mentioned at all as part of the divine plan in question? In the Odyssey, line
1.93 involves a hysteron proteron, since Pylos is mentioned second but is
visited first. This seems less likely for Menelaus’ journey in the Cypria, since
Pylos is hardly on the way to Crete from Sparta and Menelaus would not
have stopped there unless he had some specific reason. But it should also be
noted that in the Cypria, Menelaus did visit Pylos after Crete: according to
Proclus’ summary, Iris informed Menelaus immediately ‘about what had
happened in his house’, presumably while the latter was still in Crete. The
next line of the summary states ‘he takes counsel with his brother [Aga-
memnon] about an expedition against Troy, and then visits Nestor.’ Nestor
consoles him and ‘they gather the leaders, travelling around Greece.’23 There
is obviously compression here, and the Cypria included many comings and
goings not detailed by Proclus. But taking each point in order would indicate
that on his return from Crete, Menelaus stopped first at Mycenae and then
at Pylos, and from there went on to gather an army against Troy. The stop
in Pylos was evidently an important scene: Nestor urged Menelaus to drown
his sorrows in wine for the moment (fr. 17 Bernabé), but also harangued
him with a series of paradeigmata that presumably constituted an argument
for war. If, then, the lines allude to precisely this itinerary, we may have to
do with Zeus’ plan rather than Aphrodite’s: ‘I will send him to Crete, and to
Pylos – to Crete to get him out of the way, and to Pylos where Nestor will
persuade him to undertake a great war…’ And in how many epic poems did
a hero travel to Crete, and then to Pylos?
Lines 284-86, taken together, are more firmly anchored in the context
of the Telemachy as we have it, since Telemachus is instructed to question
Nestor and Menelaus (284), while the latter is described correctly as the last
of the Achaeans to come home (286). The ‘Cretan’ variant would fit very
poorly here, even in a Cretan Odyssey, at least if it was still to be followed

23 καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα Ἶρις ἀγγέλλει τῷ Μενελάῳ τὰ γεγονότα κατὰ τὸν οἶκον. ὁ δὲ
παραγενόμενος περὶ τῆς ἐπ’ Ἴλιον στρατείας βουλεύεται μετὰ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ, καὶ
πρὸς Νέστορα παραγίνεται Μενέλαος. Νέστωρ δὲ ἐν παρεκβάσει διηγεῖται αὐτῷ
ὡς Ἐπωπεὺς φθείρας τὴν Λυκούργου θυγατέρα ἐξεπορθήθη, καὶ τὰ περὶ Οἰδίπουν
καὶ τὴν Ἡρακλέους μανίαν καὶ τὰ περὶ Θησέα καὶ Ἀριάδνην. ἔπειτα τοὺς ἡγεμόνας
ἀθροίζουσιν ἐπελθόντες τὴν Ἑλλάδα (‘After this Iris tells Menelaus about the things
that have happened in his home. He takes counsel with his brother [Agamemnon]
about an expedition against Troy, and then visits Nestor. In a digression, Nestor re-
counts to him how Epopeus corrupted the daughter of Lycurgus and was besieged,
and the story of Oedipus, and the madness of Heracles and the story of Theseus and
Ariadne. Then they gather the leaders, traveling around Greece’, Cyp. arg. 24-30).
A digression on the deaths of Castor and Pollux appears to have stood between the
homeward journey of Paris and the events described here.

207
by a line like 286: ‘who was the last of the bronze-clad Achaeans to arrive
home.’ Idomeneus could hardly have been so described.24 It could be that
the variant on 285 is a secondary corruption introduced through the idea
that Zenodotus changed ‘Sparta’ to ‘Crete’ throughout, or it may have been
crafted originally to be placed after 1.93 in an awkward attempt to work
Crete into the Pylos/Sparta itinerary (see n. 2 above). Nevertheless, ‘from
there to Crete, and lord Idomeneus’, taken entirely on its own, could have
appeared in a context in which Menelaus was given detailed instructions for
his journey to Crete.25
How, then, could a line or two from the Cypria have found their way
into Zenodotus’ copy of the Odyssey? According to Martin West, this ‘text’
may have been nothing more than a rhapsode’s copy from the scholar’s na-
tive Ephesus. Stephanie West argues further that a rhapsode may have been
accustomed to perform the Cretan Odyssey alongside Homer’s Odyssey.26
Clearly, this argument goes equally well for the Cypria. Indeed, as I note
above, the Cypria is better attested than the Cretan Odyssey, and of all the
Cyclic epics it was, perhaps, most likely to have remained in the rhapsodic
repertoire down to Hellenistic times. Assuming that such copies were pro-
duced, ultimately, by dictation of an actual rhapsode performing from
memory, one could easily imagine how a line from the Cypria could have
replaced a very similar line in the Odyssey. The similarity of the lines them-
selves would account for the slip; but this similarity could, in turn, have
been the result of more than just formulaic affinity. There is also the possi-
bility that scenes in the Cypria arranging for the absence of Menelaus were
consciously modelled on scenes in the Odyssey arranging for Telemachus’
journey.27
There is a third possibility, however, which has in its favour that it makes
room for Zenodotus himself in all of this. It is often remarked that the many
strange or even impossible ‘readings’ ascribed to Zenodotus in the scholia are
unlikely to be the result of a real editorial process, as assumed by the ancient
sources. Indeed, his copy seems, in general, to have been even sloppier than
24 According to all accounts, Idomeneus came straight home from Troy with no
difficulty.
25 The mention of Idomeneus would not be unusual, since he was at this time king

of Crete and grandnephew of Catreus; Menelaus would naturally visit his house on
any trip to the place.
26 See notes 6 and 15 above.
27 Note that the situations are roughly similar, since in each case a hero is sent on a

lengthy journey, while the lady of the house is left alone in the company of a
prospective suitor or suitors. There would be a palpable irony in the contrast
between Athena’s well-meaning send-off of Telemachus and the sinister divine
forces working on Menelaus.

208
one would really expect, even in a rhapsodic text, since it evidently con-
tained a number of wild, nonsensical and even unmetrical variants. As Van
Thiel notes, a great many Zenodotean ‘readings’ seem to reflect other
Homeric passages that could have been adduced as interesting parallels to
the actual text.28 On this basis, Van Thiel has suggested that what
Zenodotus left behind was neither an edition, nor an unaltered text, but a
text that contained marginal notes recording parallels or comparanda on
individual lines. These marginal notes could then have been misinterpreted
by poste-rity as ‘readings’, conjectures or emendations that Zenodotus
intended to replace the received text, especially if it was the scholar’s habit
to record a parallel by simply writing down the essential word or phrase
upon which it was based. Some of Van Thiel’s examples seem to reveal an
interest in the use of different place names in metrically or thematically
parallel passages.29 Is it possible that Zenodotus occasionally noted down
parallels, not from elsewhere in the Iliad and Odyssey, but from other early
epic poems, many of which were still routinely attributed to Homer in his
day? Could it be, in short, that next to a line reading ‘I will send him to
Sparta, and sandy Pylos’, Zenodotus wrote down an interesting parallel,
recalled by him from a similar passage in the Cypria – ‘I will send him to
Crete, and sandy Pylos’?

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28
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209
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