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Hyginus, Fabula 89 (Laomedon)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

A. H. F. Griffin
A. H. F. Griffin
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

Neptunus et Apollo dicuntur Troiam muro cinxisse; his rex Laomedon uouit quod regno suo pecoris eo anno natum esset immolaturum. id uotum auaritia fefellit. alii dicunt †parum eum promisisse.

The story that Neptune and Apollo together built the walls of Troy for Laomedon is well known from Homer. At the end of their year's service the perfidious king refused to pay the agreed wages. Ovid tells the familiar story in one of his transitional sections in the Metamorphoses. Hyginus' account poses the textual problem indicated above. H. I. Rose comments on ‘parum’ as follows: ‘procul dubio corruptum hoc neque arridet Schmidtii coniectura promsisse. fuitne partum equarum? hoc enim plerumque narratur, equos quos a Ioue accepisset promisisse Laomedontem mercedis nomine…sed Herculi; quod facile ad deos mercennarios transferri potuit; atque non equos sed equas fuisse tradit Apollod. II, 104’. Rose rightly rejects Schmidt's emendation ‘promsisse’. ‘Promisisse’ has every sign of soundness and the difficulty lies, as Rose sees, with ‘parum’. Rose's own conjecture ‘partum equarum’, however, will not do. Apart from the oddity of the expression, one would need a good deal more persuasion than Rose offers to accept that the well-known promise of Zeus' horses which Laomedon made to Hercules (Hom. Il. 5.648–51, Ov. Met. 11.213–15) was transferred from Hercules to Neptune and Apollo. There is no suggestion anywhere in the sources that Laomedon promised to give Neptune and Apollo the famous horses as payment for building the walls.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , December 1986 , pp. 541
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1986

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References

1 Text as edited by H. I. Rose (Leyden, 1934), p. 65. J. Micyllus published the editio princeps of Hyginus' Fabulae from a single manuscript, written c. a.d. 900. Fragments of this manuscript were discovered in bindings at Regensburg in 1864 and at Munich in 1942. Micyllus was a negligent and uncritical transcriber of the difficult Beneventan script: see Reeve, M. D. on ‘Hyginus: Fabulae’ in Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, L. D. (Oxford, 1983), pp. 189–90Google Scholar. It is on this insecure foundation that the task of establishing the text of the Fabulae has to proceed.

2 Hom. Il. 7.452–3. At Il. 21.441–57 Neptune alone built the walls while Apollo served as Laomedon's herdsman.

3 Ov. Met. 11.199–210.

4 H. I. Rose, op. cit. p. 66 (footnote).

5 See Hom. Il. 21. 450–7, Apollod. 2.5.9, Hor. Carm. 3.3.21, Ov. Met. 11.199–204.

6 Grant, Mary A., The Myths of Hyginus (Lawrence, 1960), University of Kansas Press, p. 1Google Scholar.