Abstract
The general opinion of classical philologians is well reflected by Oldfather when he speaks' of 'Zenodotus and Aristophanes, who, as is well known, held a somewhat heterodox view about the equivalence of the dual and the plural in Homer'. This belief needs, in my opinion, correction. Linguists have worked to a clear understanding in general of the forces that produced the welter of dual and plural forms found in the text of Homer. In the epic dialect the dual is an inheritance from Aeolic, but its use is being continued and imitated by Ionic-speaking poets, who have no dual in their daily dialect, and the result is naturally deviation from the earlier usage.2 Just how far this deviation extended during the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey is a question about which, in my opinion, the linguists have been led astray by a misunderstanding of the philological evidence. There is a secondary increase of the confusion due to interpolation which must be sorted out, and also a tertiary increase of two sorts. First, we have linguistic evidence,3 most strongly marked in Zenodotus, for Ionic influence upon the text in post-Pisistratean times. To this I should ascribe the substitution of
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