---
title: D-Scholia on the Iliad
title_greek: Σχόλια εἰς Ἰλιάδα
author: Scholia on the Iliad and Odyssey
eul_wid: vta-ah
eul_aid: vta
canonical: "https://eulogikon.org/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-vta-ah"
lang: grc
period: Late Antique
dialect: Attic
domain: "Grammar, Poetry"
genre: Commentary
content_hash: "sha256:681f3e181073efd435112a77f9348171de57c846d78a1e7347e119caf305cd0b"
content_modified_at: "2026-10-22"
license: "https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"
---

# D-Scholia on the Iliad

*Σχόλια εἰς Ἰλιάδα*

**Author:** Scholia on the Iliad and Odyssey

**eul_wid:** `vta-ah` · [HTML page](https://eulogikon.org/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-vta-ah)

## Contents

### [Book I](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-1-vta-aha)

Headed as old scholia, these notes on the first book of the <cite>Iliad</cite> begin with the wrath of Achilles and ask why Homer starts in the tenth year of the war. They derive Achilles' name, trace the Achaeans to Achaeus son of Xuthus, and gloss Achilles' oath on the sceptre. Zeus and Hera are said to have taken the kingship of heaven after Cronus, Hera's golden throne is read as fiery upper air, and this book alone is said to have no simile.

### [Book II](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-2-vta-ahb)

Zeus lies awake and sends the baneful Dream to Agamemnon, and the glosses on the second book explain that he had slept at the end of the first, but only briefly. Nestor's advice not to waste time brings an anecdote of Alexander, and the golden tassels of Athena's aegis an account of coins stamped with an ox. In the Trojan catalogue the glosses reach the Maeander and Mycale, the Carian who went to war in gold, and Sarpedon's Lycia on the Xanthus.

### [Book III](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-3-vta-ahc)

The accent of atar is disputed, with Callimachus cited for one reading, before the cranes of the third book fly to Ocean to make war on the Pygmies. At the wall Antenor recalls hosting Odysseus and Menelaus when they came to Troy as envoys to demand Helen, and the notes compare the two men's stature. Paris, vanished from the field, is hated by every Trojan, and Agamemnon demands Helen back with a penalty.

### [Book IV](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-4-vta-ahd)

The gods meet on the golden floor of Zeus's hall, and a scholion on the fourth book asks why Hebe pours for all of them while Ganymede serves Zeus alone, answering with an allegory of Zeus as first mind. In Agamemnon's review of the army the men of the two Ajaxes mass like a storm cloud, and Nestor marshals his captains Pelagon, Alastor and Chromius. A man struck from a distance is distinguished from one wounded hand to hand.

### [Book V](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-5-vta-ahe)

Athena's gift of strength and daring to Diomedes prompts a survey of what Stoics, Academics, Cyrenaics and Epicureans meant by daring, and a reply to Zoilus of Ephesus, who mocked the fire blazing from Diomedes' shoulders. In the fifth book the binding of Ares by the Aloadae in a bronze jar for thirteen months is read in turn as the Aloadae putting an end to war, as astronomy, with the planet in the sign of the Lion, and, by preference, as allegory.

### [Book VI](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-6-vta-ahf)

Ajax breaking the Trojan line is read as three metaphors at once, a wall, a rent and a light. When Hector visits Troy in Book VI, the glosses resolve the clash between Hecuba's praise of wine and his refusal of it: the poet gives each speaker a view of their own. Forms of address such as ētheie, Paris's word to Hector, are explained, with the bowl of freedom set up for Zeus after victory.

### [Book VII](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-7-vta-ahg)

Hector and Paris come back to the fight, and the notes tell Pherecydes' story of Areithous the mace-man. When lots are shaken in a helmet for the duel with Hector, the scholiast infers that the heroes could not write, since each man marked a lot of his own. For Euneus, who sends wine to the Achaean camp, the glosses to the seventh book tell, after Asclepiades, how the Lemnian women killed their husbands and how Jason, landing from the Argo, fathered him on Hypsipyle.

### [Book VIII](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-8-vta-ahh)

The several meanings of ēōs and Zeus's threat to throw any disobedient god into Tartarus begin the notes on the eighth book. Agamemnon's rebuke of the boasts the Achaeans made over wine on Lemnos follows, then the eagle Zeus sends with a fawn in its talons and an account of why the eagle is Zeus's bird. From the thousand Trojan watchfires, with fifty men seated by each, the scholiast reckons the citizens of Troy at fifty thousand.

### [Book IX](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-9-vta-ahi)

Panic grips the Achaeans, and the simile of two winds blowing from Thrace raises the question how Boreas and Zephyr can both come from there. In Achilles' reply to the embassy of the ninth book the notes cite Aristarchus, following Thucydides, for the view that Homer's Hellas is Thessaly alone, and explain Pytho and Apollo's treasure. When the envoys return Diomedes answers, and the scholiast remarks that Diomedes is always found opposed to Achilles.

### [Book X](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-10-vta-ahj)

Agamemnon lies awake marvelling at the Trojan fires, and the scholiast explains how the king could see them over the Achaean wall. Later in the tenth book the notes trace the boar's-tusk helmet lent to Odysseus through Amphidamas of Scandeia on Cythera, and ask why Athena sends a heron rather than her owl. Odysseus's tally of the night's dead counts Rhesus apart from his companions and Dolon as the thirteenth, and the two heroes bathe after the raid.

### [Book XI](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-11-vta-ahk)

Dawn rising from Tithonus's bed brings the myth of Tithonus: granted immortality without youth, he was turned into a cicada, and by him Dawn bore Memnon. Agamemnon's arming follows, with the breastplate whose fame reached Cyprus, and the eleventh book's glosses track Hector's chariot and Ajax's slow retreat. Where Patroclus dresses Eurypylus's wound, the notes give three answers to how Patroclus came by the bitter root, and name it as birthwort.

### [Book XII](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-12-vta-ahl)

Hellanicus's account of Patroclus, who killed a boy in a quarrel over knucklebones and fled to Peleus in Phthia, opens the twelfth book's scholia. The scholiast holds that Homer invented the Achaean wall in Achilles' honour and then had it destroyed, so that no later reader could convict the poet of fiction. Hector's rebuke of Polydamas brings the story of Polydamas's father Panthous, fetched from Delphi to prophesy for Priam, and Hector smashes the gate with a stone.

### [Book XIII](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-13-vta-ahm)

Aristodemus's story of how the Thebans, bidden by an oracle, carried Hector's bones from the Troad to Thebes is attached to the thirteenth book's first line; the horse-milking nomads on whom Zeus turns his eyes are then called most just for their plain diet. In the simile of Ares and Fear going to war the notes list the four cities called Ephyra and tell of the lawless Phlegyes and Amphion's walls. Ajax and Hector trade threats.

### [Book XIV](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-14-vta-ahn)

Why Nestor seems to have been at his wine since the end of the eleventh book is the scholiast's first question: Homer, returning to the old man, takes up the action where it was left. In the deception of Zeus, Hera promises Sleep the Grace Pasithea, and Sleep's memory of an earlier service brings the story of Heracles driven by Hera's storm to Cos and its king Eurypylus. In the fourteenth book's fighting Peneleos lifts Ilioneus's severed head like a poppy head.

### [Book XV](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-15-vta-aho)

Zeus wakes on Ida and reminds Hera how he once hung her from the sky with anvils at her feet, a punishment read as an allegory of air bound to the fiery upper air. Apollo then bridges the trench and scatters the wall as a child scatters sand, and the glosses on the fifteenth book explain his epithet ēie. Ajax's cry that safety lies in the Achaeans' own hands is a line Aristarchus and Dionysius Thrax construe differently.

### [Book XVI](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-16-vta-ahp)

Patroclus weeps like a little girl begging to be picked up, and Achilles' mention of Menoetius brings Philostephanus's genealogy of the house of Aeacus: Peleus's killing of Phocus, Telamon's flight to Salamis, and Patroclus brought up by Chiron beside Achilles. The sixteenth book's notes explain why the Myrmidons are like wasps. The dying Patroclus calls Hector third of his killers though four are named, and the scholiast answers that the doom shared by all men is left out of the count.

### [Book XVII](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-17-vta-ahq)

Menelaus stands over Patroclus's body like a cow over her first calf, and the glosses follow Menelaus's clash with Euphorbus and the proverb that a fool learns only once the harm is done. In the seventeenth book Ajax is ranked next after Achilles, and Apollo, in the likeness of the herald Periphas son of Epytus, rouses Aeneas. As the body is borne from the field, starlings and jackdaws scatter before a hawk, with the proverb that jackdaw sits by jackdaw.

### [Book XVIII](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-18-vta-ahr)

Why Antilochus, not Automedon, brings Achilles the news of Patroclus's death, and why he runs unarmed, are the first questions on the eighteenth book; the notes then trace Patroclus's descent through Actor and Aegina. In the shield of Achilles they treat the Pleiades and Hyades, with Hellanicus's list of the Pleiades' unions and the origins of their names, and the dancing-floor, the potter trying his wheel and the tumblers.

### [Book XIX](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-19-vta-ahs)

Achilles fears flies breeding worms in Patroclus's wounds, and Thetis, bringing the new armour, promises to keep them off; the scholiast asks why Achilles summons the army without a herald. Odysseus's counsel that the men must eat before fighting, and that a king may make amends to a man he wronged, runs through the nineteenth book's notes. Xanthus, the horse that foretells Achilles' death at the hands of Apollo and Paris, is silenced by the Erinyes, to whom the scholiast assigns everything uncanny.

### [Book XX](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-20-vta-aht)

Themis summons the gods to Olympus, and the scholiast explains that Ocean stays away lest the eldest of them stop their battle, and sorts the nymphs by groves, trees, springs, flocks, mountains and marshes. After Demetrius of Scepsis, the rise on the Trojan plain is identified as Callicolone, where the goddesses were judged for beauty. Later in the twentieth book Achilles lashes himself like a lion whose tail hides a black sting, and Achilles' chariot tramples the dead.

### [Book XXI](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-21-vta-ahu)

Rain, which swells it, is one answer to why the Xanthus, alone of the rivers that flow from Ocean, is called son of Zeus; the other is a story of Heracles, whose thirst Zeus relieved with a spring that Heracles dug out and named Scamander. Then, as Book XXI goes on, the river turns on Achilles, and Aristarchus reads cheras as river stones. Agenor, last, deliberates under the oak as Achilles bears down on him.

### [Book XXII](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-22-vta-ahv)

The dog of Orion in the simile of Achilles' approach is claimed by some for Erigone, and the scholia to the twenty-second book tell the Athenian story of her father Icarius and the dog she reared. Hector's proposal that they swear by the gods is glossed, with Achilles' refusal and Hector left without a second spear. Andromache, lamenting their son, recalls the boy fed on marrow at Hector's knee.

### [Book XXIII](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-23-vta-ahw)

The Achaeans reach the ships and the Hellespont in a line the scholiast calls metrically headless, and the twenty-third book's glosses go on to the oxen slaughtered for Patroclus's funeral feast. In the chariot race Apollo favours Eumelus's mares, which the god reared while serving Admetus, and the glosses follow Eumelus's broken yoke-pole. In the archery contest Teucer's arrow cuts the cord and Meriones, taking the bow, hits the dove; the javelin-throwers come after.

### [Book XXIV](/works/homer-comm-d-scholia-iliad-book-24-vta-ahx)

Achilles lies sleepless in grief, and when the gods urge Hermes to steal Hector's body the scholiast tells, after Eratosthenes, of Hermes' birth to Maia on Cyllene and of Hermes' thefts, Apollo's cattle among them. The thatched hut of Achilles, with its pine bar, and the table left standing after his meal are described in the glosses to the last book. Helen's twenty years away are explained as ten of mustering and ten of war, and Hector is buried.

## License and provenance

Eulogikon publishes public-domain Greek texts in cleaned, structured, readable form and makes no copyright claim over that preparation (Public Domain Mark 1.0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/). Cite as `eul_wid: vta-ah`.