STESICHORUS: THE GERYONEIS
There is then no alternative to the stone. And the sequence of events is now coherent: the shielded and helmeted adversary seems impenetrable; knock his helmet off, and aim promptly at the unprotected head and, before he could pick his helmet up, Heracles shot him through the forehead.
“…(the arrow) with doom of hateful death about its head,smeared with blood and with…gall, agonies from the manslaying speckle- necked Hydra. In silence and stealthily it thrust into his forehead, and by divine dispensation it cleft through flesh and bones. And it held straight through,that arrow, to the top of his head, and stained with crimson blood his breastplate and gory limbs. And Geryon bent his neck over to one side,like a poppy that spoils its delicate shape, shedding its petals all at once…”
Thus Mr Barrett; and the general sense is clear enough. The arrow ‘has doom around its head’: ii 4-6: redundat atque efunditur, indeed. The arrow which is about to pierce the head from brow to skull-top needs no poison, still less an elaborate description of the poison which is to be superfluous.
So much of Stesichorus’ phrasing is simple and conventional that it is of interest to observe the occasional stroke of almost Pindaric boldness: the blood and gall on the arrow-head are described as ’agonies from the manslaying speckle-necked Hydra’, i.e. sources of agony provided by the Hydra’s poison, in which Heracles had dipped his arrows.
…
As usual, once the poet has made the point of comparison (and this one is among the farthest-fetched), the simile goes its own way without regard for the context. What follows describes the poppy; it is wholly irrelevant to the wounded man. Stesichorus, like Virgil (Aen. 9.436), found this Homeric simile irresistibly attractive; but the picture which he proceeds to paint is quite his own. There is nothing in Homer about the poppy ‘spoiling its delicate shape’ or ’shedding its petals all at once’ (if that is what acoa means; ‘quickly’, ’all of a sudden’).
Denys Page. The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 93 (1973)
