Hippodamos and Hypeirochos

Diomedes and Athena attacking Ares (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are in the middle of Hector's interrupted aristeia.  He has killed a list of people, and now the Greeks are regrouping, or at least Diomedes and Odysseus are. Odysseus kills these two.

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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Abarbarea

Herakles (on the left) about to kill Laomedon, king of Troy (on the right). Behind Herakles stands Hesione, raising her right hand to her chin in sign of melancholy. Side A from a terra sigillata flask by the workkshop of Felix (Southern Gaul), late 1st–early 2nd century CE. From the necropolis of Lugone in Salò. Stored in the Museo Civico Archeologico della Valle Sabbia in Gavardo (Brescia). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Euryalos kills 4 men next in book 6, but Oswald doesn't mention two of them, and concentrates on the twin brothers, Pedasus and Aesepus, he kills next.  Homer gives their father's genealogy - Boukolion, eldest-born of Laomedon, so (one assumes) should have been king, but his mother wasn't married - and Boukolion in turn mated with a naiad, whose name Homer actually gives: Abarbarea.  Oswald ignores all this, even the name of the father, except the name of the naiad, and describes her enjoying lying about as a blue pool, alone, until a young man jumped into her "in the middle of his astonished sheep".

Both the twin boys of the mother died that day, she concludes, and then follows with a simile taken from Achilles' battle with the river Scamander (book 21): a man clears out a path for a little stream and finds himself overwhelmed by a river running downhill.

What's the association?  Two river-deities, but one overwhelms (Achilles) and the other is overwhelmed; but she isn't really; she gives birth to twins, an unexpectedly strong response and not one the father had in mind when he cleared out the stream with his mattock.But the focus is the mother, and the unexpectedness of the twins, and possibly "running downstream" = "to their deaths".

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• 2012.03.46 (bmcreview.org)