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| Diomedes and Athena attacking Ares (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Homer gives one line for both: "Ἱππόδαμον δ’ Ὀδυσεὺς καὶ Ὑπείροχον ἐξενάριξεν" - "and Odysseus stripped Hippodamos and Hypeirochos" - and only half a sentence at that, with the other half taken up by Diomedes. Oswald gives each of the dead a line ("And Hippodamos died ... And Hypeirochos died ...". She doesn't say who killed them or which side they were on, and each one gets his own simile, but (unusually) not repeated.
The similes are interesting. One is drawn from the break in Diomedes' aristeia, Iliad 5.596-600, where Diomedes, after he's been wounded by Pandaros, sees Hector coming with Ares beside him and like any sensible man, is brought up short - like a man crossing a plain who stops and steps back at the bank of a foaming river. The second is drawn from Achilles' fight with the river Scamander, Iliad 21.281-283: he's calling on the gods as the river chases him and threatens to overwhelm him (Oswald has already used the simile just previous to this one, about a man gardening and loosening a stream). He complains that he wishes he was going to get killed by a hero instead of being swept away in a river like a swineherd's boy trying to cross in a storm.
Diomedes and Achilles escape their rivers, metaphoric and real; Hippodamos and Hypeirochos do not.
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