The 'Mantle of Stone' Re-Worked: Comments on the Relationship of Lycoph. Alex. 333 to Hom. IL. 3.57 and the Style of Lycophron's Alexandra*

In the enigmatic poem Alexandra commonly ascribed to the Hellenistic poet Lycophron of Chalcis (3rd century bce), the fate of queen Hecuba is described in the following lines (330–34):

σὲ δ' ἀμφὶ κοίλην αἰχμάλωτον ᾐόναπρέσβυν Δολόγκων δημόλευστον ὠλένῃἐπεσβόλοις ἀραῖσιν ἠρεθισμένῃκρύψει κύπασσις χερμάδων ἐπομβρίᾳΜαίρας ὅταν φαιουρὸν ἀλλάξῃς δομήν.

But you, aged captive by the hollow shore,stoned by the arm of the people of the Doloncians,which was enraged by your railing curses,a stony mantle will hide in a torrent of rocks,when you have put on the reddish-brown body of Maira.¹

The version of the myth presumed and presented in highly compressed form by Lycophron is known in more detail from other sources: after the sack of the city, Hecuba, the aged queen of Troy, was taken captive and brought to the land of the Doloncians on the Thracian Chersonese where she avenged the death of her son Polydorus, and after she had blinded his killer, the Thracian king Polymestor, she was transformed into a dog and was subsequently stoned to death (see also Lycoph. Alex. 1174–88 on Hecuba's transformation and cenotaph).²

At first reading, the metaphor κύπασσις χερμάδων 'mantle of stones' in line 333 is cryptic, as befits the style of the poem as a large-scale riddle,³ but the phrasing is distinctive enough to be recognizable to the erudite reader as an intertextual reworking of a famous metaphor from the Iliad:⁴ in Book 3, Hector chastises his brother Paris and threatens that, if the Trojans were less indulgent towards his philandering, 'you would be wearing a shirt of stone for all the misery you have caused' (Il. 3.57: λάινον ἕσσο χιτῶνα κακῶν ἕνεχ' ὅσσα ἔοργας), probably a novel and imaginative variation of the similar expression 'putting on (a garment of) earth', a metaphorical euphemism for burial in later Greek.⁵ There are no direct verbal echoes between the two passages, but the metaphor is unique and accordingly most commentators merely mention the model of Iliad 3.57 for Lycoph. Alex. 333, even though the precise relationship between the two passages is not made explicit.⁶ Indeed, Lycophron's adaptation is certainly meant to evoke the original Homeric metaphor, but the imagery of the passage and the effects it produces are more complicated and will be examined in the following discussion.

Initially, it seems as if Lycophron has simply rephrased the Homeric metaphor in the language of his tragic messenger speech and substituted different words for the original phrasing. The lexeme κύπασσις, which has come to replace the Homeric χιτών and similarly denotes a short shirt or frock for both men and women reaching to mid-thigh,⁷ is not a particularly common word and is mainly attested in fragmentary sources.⁸ In its rarity, it is typical of Lycophron's penchant for peculiar and uncommon words.⁹ The Homeric adjective λάινος 'made of stone' (derived from λᾶας 'stone', 'boulder'; cf. Il. 2.319; 3.12; 7.268; 12.445, 453; Od. 9.537; 11.594, 596, 598; 14.163) is taken up by the genitive χερμάδων. Χερμάς is a conventional poetic word well adapted to this context, since it denotes a large stone, especially one used for throwing or slinging.¹⁰ Therefore any ancient reader with sufficient erudition to read and understand Lycophron's Alexandra could not fail to notice that the collocation κύπασσις χερμάδων is a paraphrase of the unique image of the Homeric λάινος χιτών, both phrases meaning 'a garment of stones' as a creative metaphor for death by stoning.

However, in the Alexandra the following word ἐπομβρίᾳ partially deconstructs the original image: κύπασσις 'coat' and ἐπομβρία 'rain',¹¹ even though they at first seem to share a common conceptual domain, are both used figuratively, while only χερμάδες 'stones' is to be taken literally. As it is, neither of the two nouns can be understood literally and on its own: neither Hecuba, in the shape of a dog, being hidden by an actual mantle in a metaphorical torrent of stones, nor a figurative mantle of stones covering her in a literal shower of rain makes good sense from a logical point of view.¹² Thus κύπασσις metaphorically denotes 'something covering the...