II. Attestations and lexical meanings of θοῦρος and θοῦρις

Already in the Greek lexicographical tradition, it was recognized that θοῦρις and θοῦρος belong together.Footnote ² Modern lexicographical works, in part following the ancient sources, generally consider θοῦρις and θοῦρος to be synonyms meaning ‘rushing, impetuous, furious’.Footnote ³ These translations are imprecise for several reasons. First, since epithets generally denote extra-temporal qualities of their referents rather than an ongoing action, a translation like ‘rushing’ does not make much sense. Moreover, renderings like ‘impetuous, i.e. that rushes/leaps with violent impetus at enemy’Footnote ⁴ are not based on how θοῦρος is used, but inspired by the supposed etymological connection with θορϵῖν (‘to leap’) or by glosses given in the scholia. Finally, while the rendering ‘impetuous, furious’ is perhaps not impossible for θοῦρος, it is clearly inadequate for θοῦρις.

Let us consider the attestations of both forms in more detail. In Homer, θοῦρος is an exclusive epithet of the war god Ares (θοῦρον Ἄρηα 9x, verse final or before the trochaic caesura, and θοῦρος Ἄρης 2x). After Homer the adjective continues to be applied mainly to Ares (Tyrtaeus, Simonides, Euripides and also in an Attic epigram);Footnote ⁵ more exceptionally, it qualifies other warlike persons or beings, but only in the tragedians.Footnote ⁶ Instructive is the phrase καὶ θοῦρός πϵρ ὤν (Aesch. fr. 199.2 Radt, Prometheus speaking to Heracles). It is reminiscent of the Homeric (καὶ) κρατϵρός πϵρ ἐών (‘however fierce you are’) and shows that the meaning of θοῦρος was similar to that of κρατϵρός (‘fierce, warlike’).Footnote ⁷ Finally, θοῦρος does not qualify a person, but a weapon in θοῦρον … δόρυ (Eur. Rhes. 492, cf. also δόρυ θοῦρον in Ap. Rhod.).

The second form θοῦρις (gen. -ιδος) exclusively occurs in dactylic poetry and only modifies feminine nouns. It has an acc. sg. θοῦριν and is especially frequent in the verse-final phrase θούριδος ἀλκῆς (‘fierce fighting spirit’, 22x in Homer), which is preceded by various verb forms beginning at one of the third foot caesurae: μνήσασθϵ δὲ θούριδος ἀλκῆς (Il. 16.270, etc.), ἔπαυσϵ δὲ θούριδος ἀλκῆς (Il. 17.81) and several others. A number of these phrases also occur with χάρμης replacing θούριδος ἀλκῆς, for example, μνήσαντο δὲ χάρμης (Il. 4.222, etc.), παῦσϵ δὲ χάρμης (Il. 12.389). This gave epic poets the option of shortening (or extending) the phrase by one dactyl; to use the term coined by Egbert Bakker, χάρμης and θούριδος ἀλκῆς are ‘functional synonyms’ in such pairs of phrases.Footnote ⁸ This point illustrates that χάρμη and ἀλκή are near synonyms themselves: both express the concept of fighting spirit or martial courage.Footnote ⁹ In a second and more marginal use, θοῦρις in Homer qualifies the aegis and a shield, bringing to mind the post-Homeric phrase θοῦρον δόρυ just mentioned.Footnote ¹⁰ The derivative θούριος, which occurs mainly in the tragedians, likewise qualifies warlike fighters as well as their weapons; it is rightly considered to be a synonym of θοῦρος by the dictionaries.Footnote ¹¹

Now, an important question is: how could an epithet meaning something like ‘impetuous, furious’ be applied to a shield, an inanimate defensive weapon? The dictionaries and commentaries come up with various emergency solutions.Footnote ¹² Cunliffe remarks that there has been a ‘transference of epithet from the bearer to the shield’, but it is not immediately obvious what exactly is meant by this, other than that θοῦρος primarily qualified persons.Footnote ¹³ How could this transfer take place? It seems to me that sturdy weapons are called θοῦρος or θοῦρις because they are tough-looking: as such they confer ἀλκή on their bearer (who gains confidence by carrying them) and diminish that of an adversary (who will be intimidated by their aspect).Footnote ¹⁴ In this way we may also understand the use of ἄλκιμος (‘valiant, brave’) as a qualification of spears (ἄλκιμον ἔγχος, ἄλκιμα δοῦρϵ) in Homer.

In order to illustrate this, let us briefly review the three instances where the Homeric feminine acc. sg. θοῦριν qualifies a weapon. The first is ἀσπίδα θοῦριν (Il. 11.32), about Agamemnon picking up his shield in an arming scene, the place par excellence to describe weapons and their special properties. As becomes clear from its description, Agamemnon’s shield is intended to terrorize: ‘it was crowned with a wild-faced Gorgon, which gazed terribly and was flanked by Fear and Rout’ (Il. 11.36–37).

The phrase ἀσπίδα θοῦριν also occurs in a three-line description of Aeneas (Il. 20.161–63) trying to intimidate his opponent Achilles by showing his military prowess:

Finally, θοῦρις qualifies the aegis at Il. 15.308 (verse end αἰγίδα θοῦριν), an attribute of which the exact referent was probably no longer understood, but which is described in this passage as being carried ἐς φόβον ἀνδρῶν (‘for the routing of men’).Footnote ¹⁵

Thus, in all three passages θοῦριν qualifies a weapon or attribute that is explicitly described as having an intimidating effect. As a qualification of ἀλκή, θοῦρις may also have referred to the intimidating aspect of a warrior displaying his martial prowess. On the other hand, θοῦρος as an epithet of Ares signified not ‘furious’ (describing a state that applies within a specific time frame) but rather ‘fierce, warlike’ (a generic, timeless characteristic). I suspect that this is the older meaning and that the phrase θούριδος ἀλκῆς was interpreted by Homeric singers as describing the intimidating effect a fierce fighting spirit may have on opponents. In this sense, the epithet could then be applied to the shields of Agamemnon and Aeneas.Footnote ¹⁶

This is in part also what ancient commentators and lexicographers suggested. On the one hand, the scholia present us with clear folk etymologies, for instance when they gloss θοῦρον with θϵίως ὀρούων or θοῶς ὀρούων (‘who rushes like a god/quickly’) (for example, sch. vet. ad Il. 5.35, Erbse). This is a clear example of the strategy, known from Plato’s Cratylus, of etymologizing a word by providing it with a gloss that contains a permutation of all its constituent letters/sounds. On the other hand, we also find glosses that are concerned more with the sense, and they confirm what has just been said. The D-scholia ad Il. 5.30 render θοῦρον with ἐνθουσιαστικόν (‘raging, furious’) as well as ϵὐκίνητον ἐν τῷ πολέμῳ (‘agile in battle’). Various other sources gloss forms of θοῦρος or θοῦρις with πολϵμικός (‘warlike’) and/or ὁρμητικός,Footnote ¹⁷ which in this context is best interpreted as ‘warlike’, too.Footnote ¹⁸

Etymology, finally, is of little help in determining the lexical meaning of θοῦρος. A derivation from the root of θρῴσκω (aor. ἔθορον) (‘to jump, leap’) seems to be generally accepted.Footnote ¹⁹ This connection was already made by ancient lexicographers, commentators and in the scholia: for example, θούριδος ἀλκῆς· τῆς πολϵμικῆς. ἀπὸ τοῦ θορϵῖν, ὅ ἐστι πηδῆσαι, ἀφ’ οὗ καὶ θοῦρος Ἄρης (Hsch.). However, as we have seen, the translations ‘rushing’ or ‘jumping’ do not match the actual use of θοῦρος. In fact, the etymological relationship with θρῴσκω is by no means certain, as a viable alternative exists: θοῦρος could reflect an agentive nominal *d ^h ors-ó- (‘who ventures/attacks’), from the root of θρασύς (‘bold, dauntless’; from Proto-Indo-European (PIE)) *d ^h ers-, with loss of *-s- and compensatory lengthening. The formation would be of the same type as, for example, τομός (‘cutting, sharp’), φονός (‘who slays’). This etymology would account in a straightforward way for the lexical meaning of θοῦρος; it would presuppose that the accent of *d ^h orsó- was secondarily retracted.Footnote ²⁰

To conclude this lexicographical discussion, θοῦρος (‘fierce, warlike’) is mostly said of warriors, while θοῦρις means ‘fierce’ in the sense of ‘sturdy, tough-looking, intimidating’, qualifying weapons and fighting spirit. If there is a lexical difference between the two forms, it is slight: note that θοῦρος occurs as an epithet of δόρυ after Homer. Thus, lexical semantics gives us no compelling reason to expect a difference in stem formation.

III. The spread of θοῦρις in Homer

As a feminine form of θοῦρος, one expects either a form in -ᾱ (as normally in thematic adjectives) or in -ος (as usually in compounds, but also in some uncompounded thematic adjectives).Footnote ²¹ In reality, no feminine form of θοῦρος is attested in our extant evidence: it is θοῦρις which exclusively qualifies feminine nouns. Does it follow that θοῦρις is the paradigmatic feminine of θοῦρος? Not necessarily: θοῦρος is an uncommon poetic relic, and it typically qualifies referents of masculine gender. This means that the absence of a feminine form in, for example, Attic drama might in principle be ascribed to chance. ^{Footnote 22} Moreover, occurrences of θοῦρις are limited to hexameter verse and elegiac couplets. Therefore, our question can be made more precise: why is the morphologically expected feminine form of θοῦρος (whether this was θούρη or θοῦρος) never attested in the epic tradition?

The key to the answer lies in the formulaic phrase θούριδος ἀλκῆς, which accounts for 22 of the 28 occurrences of θοῦρις in Homer. In verse-final position, *θούρης ἀλκῆς or *θούρου ἀλκῆς would not be well-formed because it violates Meister’s Bridge, which states that word end was avoided after a spondaic fifth foot. Of all the metrical laws concerning hexameter verse, Meister’s Bridge is observed best by far in Homer (better than Wernicke’s Law and Hermann’s Bridge). The exceptions, only a handful, are listed and discussed by Meister.Footnote ²³ A number of them are resolvable by the fact that contraction took place relatively late, notably in the formulaic phrase ἠῶ δῖαν for earlier *ἠόα δῖαν.Footnote ²⁴ Only three Homeric verse ends are irreducible counterexamples to Meister’s Bridge: κνῆ τυρόν (Il. 11.639), κρῖ λϵυκόν (Od. 4.604) and λὶς πέτρη (Od. 12.64).Footnote ²⁵ This means that the rule was very strict in earlier stages of the tradition.

I propose that the form θοῦρις first came into being as part of the phrase θούριδος ἀλκῆς, and that the other six Homeric instances, all in the accusative θοῦριν, were created as replacements of the older form (whether θοῦρον or θούρην) under the influence of this frequent formula. First, a few remarks on the acc. θοῦριν. Three of these six cases are found in the verse end θοῦριν ἐπιϵιμένοι ἀλκήν (‘clad in fierce fighting spirit’), said of the Aiantes. On two of these occasions the Aiantes are mentioned as part of a list of nine Achaean champions who volunteer to fight: τοῖσι δ’ ἐπ’ Αἴαντϵς θοῦριν ἐπιϵιμένοι ἀλκήν (Il. 7.164 and 8.262).Footnote ²⁶ This line may well be a very old one:Footnote ²⁷ the canon of Achaean champions (ἀριστῆϵς) is probably traditional in some form, and in both passages the well-known line mentioning Meriones, with its irregular scansion of Ἐνυαλίῳ ἀνδρϵιφόντῃ, follows two lines later.Footnote ²⁸

The formula θοῦριν ἐπιϵιμένοι ἀλκήν is remarkable for the brevis in longo in the final syllable of θοῦριν. This metrical irregularity is unexpected for two reasons. First, *θούρην ἐπιϵιμένοι ἀλκήν would be metrically regular and semantically unproblematic. Secondly, an alternative and metrically equivalent way of versifying a similar idea was available, as illustrated by the verse ἄνδρ’ ἐπϵλϵύσϵσθαι μϵγάλην ἐπιϵιμένον ἀλκήν (Od. 9.214, cf. also 514).Footnote ²⁹ Being metrically regular, this seems a more recent modification of the (traditional) verse mentioning the Aiantes.

It has been claimed that θοῦριν ἐπιϵιμένοι ἀλκήν is a case of metrical lengthening,Footnote ³⁰ but this does not take into consideration that this verse end may be a modification of an older, metrically regular prototype.Footnote ³¹ As is well known, metrical lengthening is virtually restricted to words of specific prosodic shapes, mainly tribrachic (for example, οὔνομα) and antispastic words (for example, Ἀπόλλωνα), and it could be applied secondarily in cretic sequences, too.Footnote ³² However, in words with a trochaic shape like θοῦριν, there was no motivation for metrical lengthening. One may therefore suspect that the prototype of this formula had the shape *θούρην ἐπιϵιμένον ἀλκήν. This may have been changed at some point into θοῦριν ἐπιϵιμένον ἀλκήν, in spite of the metrical irregularity that was introduced, because θοῦρις had come to be viewed as the standard epithet of ἀλκή due to the frequency of the phrase θούριδος ἀλκῆς.

Next, the same substitution could take place also in the verse-final phrases ἀσπίδα θοῦριν and αἰγίδα θοῦριν (which account for the remaining three occurrences), especially since this had no metrical repercussions. This second substitution was perhaps made easier by the fact that θοῦρος was otherwise used exclusively as an epithet of Ares with the meaning ‘fierce, warlike’, which made it less suited to defensive weapons (cf. section II). Since ἀλκή was conceptually close to a defensive weapon (it is something which protects, and in which one dresses), it was logical to generalize the stem form known from the formulaic phrases θούριδος ἀλκῆς and θοῦριν ἐπιϵιμένον ἀλκήν.

In these last paragraphs I have assumed that the original feminine form was θούρη, but as I remarked earlier, it cannot be excluded that θοῦρος once had this function, too. In fact, in that case it would be even easier to explain why, for example, ἀσπίδα θοῦρον was replaced by ἀσπίδα θοῦριν: the latter would have been more clearly marked as a feminine. On the other hand, if θοῦρος was the original feminine form, the metrical irregularity in θοῦριν ἐπιϵιμένοι ἀλκήν remains unaccounted for.

Thus, all Homeric occurrences of the accusative θοῦριν can be viewed as secondary replacements of either θούρην or θοῦρον under the influence of the frequent phrase θούριδος ἀλκῆς. We have seen that θούριδος was preferred in that phrase over θούρης or θούρου because these alternatives would have caused a violation of Meister’s Bridge. As I will argue in section V, poets probably also created the form θούριδος for this very reason. However, let us first see whether θοῦρις as a feminine of θοῦρος can be explained by normal morphological processes.

IV. θοῦρις is not a flexional feminine in origin

There are two conventional linguistic means to account for a feminine adjectival form θοῦρις, having approximately the same meaning as θοῦρος. It could be an old paradigmatic feminine of θοῦρος, or originally a separate adjective derived from θοῦρος. Most handbooks remain vague or agnostic about these possibilities.Footnote ³³ Is one of these scenarios likely?

The first option, an old paradigmatic feminine, was defended by Wackernagel.Footnote ³⁴ This may seem reasonable in view of the distribution between θοῦρος and θοῦρις, but there is one very serious objection. There are two regular ways in Greek to mark feminine agreement with adjectives (both directly reflecting a procedure inherited from Indo-European):

• with third declension stems: add the suffix *-i̯a, *-i̯ā-, for example, βαρύς, f. βαρϵῖα < *-eu̯-i̯a; φοῖνιξ, f. φοίνισσα < *-īk-i̯a;

• with stems in -ος: substitute *-ā- (PIE *-eh ₂ -) for the thematic vowel, for example, νέος, f. νέᾱ.

By contrast, the suffixes -ι- and -ιδ- are not normally used to mark the feminine of adjectives, but Wackernagel apparently thought that -ίδ- had this function in the prehistory of Greek. In support of this claim he cites the following Homeric words in -ίς:

• κορωνός adj. ‘curved’ (Hippoc.); ‘having a curved horn’ (Archil.) → κορωνίς f. (17x dat. pl. κορωνίσιν, formulaic epithet of νηυσί ‘ships’);

• ἥμϵρος adj. ‘tame, cultivated’ → ἡμϵρίς f. ‘cultivated vine’;

• νύκτϵρος adj. ‘of the night, nightly’ (Aesch.+) → νυκτϵρίς f., properly ‘(animal) of the night’, hence ‘bat’;

• κραταιός adj. ‘strong, powerful’ → κραταιίς f. ‘powerful force’ (Wackernagel speaks of a ‘substantiviertes Femininum’).Footnote ³⁵

Before continuing, we must briefly address the accentuation and inflection of stems in -ις. If correctly adduced, the above parallels (which have the oxytone suffix -ίς, -ίδος irrespective of the accent of the base form) would lead one to expect a form *θουρίς, but instead we find θοῦρις, with barytone accentuation and an accusative θοῦριν. Wackernagel accounted for this as a case of ‘Aeolic barytonesis’: traditional epic words with an unexpectedly retracted accent that stem from an Aeolic dialect with recessive accentuation. In this context, he mentioned other forms such as ἵππουρις and ἄκοιτις; he saw the acc. sg. in -ιν of these words as typical for Aeolic.Footnote ³⁶ However, the evidence for Aeolic barytonesis in Homer is not abundant, and both the barytone accentuation of these compounds and their acc. in -ιν may be seen as archaisms.Footnote ³⁷ On the other hand, the accentuation of θοῦρις may have been influenced by that of θοῦρος, and it sometimes happens in Homer that an acc. sg. in -ιν is secondary for -ιδα.Footnote ³⁸ This means that θοῦρις can, but need not, be compared to forms in -ίς, -ίδος (that is, the accentuation and inflection of θοῦρις do not directly inform us about the type of derivation).

Returning to the above examples: do they justify Wackernagel’s suggestion that -ίδ- could originally mark the feminine of adjectives in -ος? Upon closer consideration, none of the cases is convincing.Footnote ³⁹ There is no reason to think that the nouns ἡμϵρίς, νυκτϵρίς and κραταιίς were once part of the paradigms of the adjectives ἥμϵρος, νύκτϵρος and κραταιός. Moreover, κραταιός has its own feminine, attested in the old formula μοῖρα κραταιή. If anything, ἡμϵρίς, νυκτϵρίς and κραταιίς are substantivizations derived from their respective adjectival base forms.Footnote ⁴⁰ By comparison, the most promising parallel for θοῦρις as a feminine of θοῦρος is the epithet κορωνίς, but the derivational analysis of this form remains uncertain, as we will see in section VI.

Thus, adjectives in -ος never had a paradigmatic feminine in -ίς. An alternative account would be that θοῦρις was originally an independent derivative that was secondarily incorporated into the paradigm of θοῦρος as its feminine form. As we will see in section VI, such an account cannot be easily applied to the pair of forms θοῦρος with θοῦρις either. Before going into the technical issues, I will first show how θοῦρις may have originated as an artificial substitute for the feminine of θοῦρος.

V. Θούριδος ἀλκῆς as a case of artificial contamination

As we have seen, the formula θούριδος ἀλκῆς stands in for metrically awkward *θούρης ἀλκῆς or *θούρου ἀλκῆς. I submit that the ending -ιδος in this formula arose under the influence of ἄναλκις -ιδος ‘cowardly; coward’ (20x Hom.), an antonym of θοῦρος. Later on, the new feminine θοῦρις, -ιδος completely ousted the original form according to the scenario proposed in section III.

Before discussing how ἄναλκις -ιδος influenced the creation of θούριδος ἀλκῆς, let us first consider some well-known Homeric parallels for a change of declension or conjugation type,Footnote ⁴¹ so as to better understand the nature of artificial word formation in Homer.

Beside the formulaic phrase τϵτιηότι θυμῷ (‘with a vexed spirit’, instrumental dative), we find another formulaic phrase τϵτιημένος ἦτορ (‘vexed at heart’, where ἦτορ is an internal accusative). The reason for changing the active participle into a middle one is that *τϵτιηὼς ἦτορ would have violated Meister’s Bridge.Footnote ⁴² Replacement with a middle form was made easier by the significant semantic overlap between both voices in the perfect stem, and also by the fact that verses ending in -μένος ἦτορ were more widespread (for example, βϵβολημένος ἦτορ, κϵχολωμένος ἦτορ).

The middle voice could be used artificially also in the present or aorist stem in cases where using the active voice would have violated Meister’s Bridge or Wernicke’s Law. A clear example is furnished by the phrases καὶ ἐξϵρϵϵίνϵτο μυθῷ (Il. 10.81) and ἀφὰρ δ’ ἐρϵϵίνϵτο μυθῷ (Od. 17.305), both in speech introductions, replacing *ἐρέϵινϵν μυθῷ.Footnote ⁴³ The sequence -ϵτο μύθῳ occurring in other verse ends may have served as a model: cf. καὶ ἐπϵίθϵτο μύθῳ (Il. 1.33, 24.571) and especially καὶ ἀμϵίβϵτο μύθῳ (Il. 24.200 and passim), again in a speech introduction.

The name Ἀντιφάτης occurs five times in Homer, with an accusative Ἀντιφάτην (twice) and a verse-final genitive Ἀντιφάταο (Od. 10.106). The accusative also appears in the form Ἀντιφατῆα (Od. 10.114), belonging to a would-be nominative Ἀντιφατϵύς but referring to the same Ἀντιφάτης as Ἀντιφάταο eight lines before. We must assume that the poet used the accusative of a name in -ϵύς for metrical reasons. From a morphological viewpoint this was certainly not trivial, because nouns in -ϵύς are normally not compounds, as noted by Meister.Footnote ⁴⁴ Similar instances are found in the inflection of compounds in -ος. For instance, the genitive of ἡνίοχος appears in the form ἡνιόχοιο, used five times at verse end. The wish to use other case forms in the same metrical position then led poets to create the artificial forms ἡνιοχῆα and ἡνιοχῆϵς.Footnote ⁴⁵

Perhaps the most famous cases of artificial nominal inflection in the fifth foot are the verse-final phrases ϵὐρέα πόντον and ϵὐρέα κόλπον. They are artificial because the only current form of the masculine acc. sg. ending of adjectives in -ύς in any form of Greek is -ύν, not -έα. The motive for avoiding the grammatically regular phrases ϵὐρὺν πόντον and ϵὐρὺν κόλπον is that these would have violated Meister’s Bridge.Footnote ⁴⁶ Witte proposed that ϵὐρέα πόντον (2x Il., 1x Od.) arose by inflection of the dative ϵὐρέϊ πόντῷ (7x Od.), that is, by analogical levelling of the paradigm, and in this he is all but universally followed.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, he does not explain how poets were able to create an ungrammatical acc. sg. ϵὐρέα. In my view, it is more attractive to suppose that the ending of ϵὐρύν was artificially changed into that of an adjective in -ής, a type which shares many case forms with stems in -ύς. This is made likely by the existence of other verse ends in -έα πόντον, notably ἐπ’ ἠϵροϵιδέα πόντον.Footnote ⁴⁸

What actually happened in linguistic terms in these examples is usually left unstated.Footnote ⁴⁹ In my view, all of the artificial epic forms discussed above are best viewed as contaminations or blends with other forms and formulas that came to the poets’ minds as they composed.Footnote ⁵⁰ As is stressed by treatments of contamination in handbooks about historical linguistics,Footnote ⁵¹ contamination usually occurs in words that regularly co-occur, for example, in antonymic pairs (cf. English male and female for older male and femelle) or in sequences of numerals (for example, in the Greek dialect of Heraclea, where ὀκτώ, ἐννέα become hοκτώ, hϵννέα under the influence of ἕξ, ἑπτά). In epic verse composition, contaminations are likely to have been promoted by the fact that specific words regularly occurred in certain metrical positions. The examples just discussed clearly illustrate this point. Thus, in the case of verse-final ἡνιοχῆα, -ῆϵς, -ῆας, some poet may have created these forms when he was reminded of the simplex noun ὀχϵύς (13x Hom.), which occurs in the case forms ὀχῆα, ὀχῆϵς, ὀχῆας (12x in total), and always in verse-final position. A similar example is πατροφονῆα (3x Od., each time referring to Aegisthus): we may suspect that the poet of the Odyssey (or a precursor) coined it by crossing the simplex φονϵύς (‘slayer’, Hom.+, attested at verse end in gen. sg. φονῆος, acc. pl. φονῆας) with the expected but rare compound πατροφόνος (‘slaying a father’), or with the more usual πατροκτόνος (‘parricide’).

In epic Greek, conditions were favourable for a contamination between θοῦρος and ἄναλκις.Footnote ⁵² The demands of verse composition provided a clear motivation for reshaping existing word forms. When confronted with the undesirable metrical shape of verse-final *θούρης ἀλκῆς or *θούρου ἀλκῆς, epic poets may have been led to think of phrases containing the antonym ἄναλκις.Footnote ⁵³ This connection was favoured in particular by the fact that ἄναλκις is linked to ἀλκή etymologically. In addition, Homer uses the phrases ἀνάλκιδα θυμόν (‘cowardly spirit’, Il. 16.355 and 656) and ἀνάλκιδα φύζαν (‘weak-spirited panic’, Il. 15.62), which refer to the opposite of θούριδος ἀλκῆς (‘fierce fighting spirit’). These are similar not only in terms of semantics, but also word order and word shape: in all cases the head noun follows the modifier, and it is disyllabic.Footnote ⁵⁴ Finally, as one reviewer of this paper remarked, the fact that θ…ιδ- ἀλκ- (in θούριδος ἀλκῆς) is a phonic permutation of -άλκ-ιδ- θ… (in the phrase ἀνάλκιδα θυμόν) may have played a role.

The proposed source of the contamination, ἄναλκις -ιδος, is an adjective in -ι(δ)- with identical masculine and feminine forms. Such adjectives were on the verge of extinction (cf. section VI.ii), and the suffix -ιδ- in the contaminated phrase θούριδος ἀλκῆς could easily be reinterpreted as a feminine marker: nouns with this suffix were feminine almost without exception, and there were a few other adjectives in -ος with a derived feminine in -ίδ- (cf. sections III and VI.i). Consequently, other forms of the original feminine of θοῦρος could also be replaced by forms of θοῦρις along the lines set out in section II.

Two further epic words in -ίς must be discussed as parallels for an artificial contamination: the nouns παλλακίς (‘concubine’) and ἀγκαλίς (‘bent arms, embrace’). As noted by Meier,Footnote ⁵⁵ the use of both forms in Homer must be metrically conditioned: compared to the Classical Ionic-Attic forms παλλακή and ἀγκάλη, they appear to have undergone an artificial change of declension type:Footnote ⁵⁶

• Since the only practicable case forms in a hexameter were παλλακή, παλλακῇ and παλλακαί (before vowels), whereas παλλακίς could be used in all case forms, it is likely that the latter is an artificial substitute for παλλακή.Footnote ⁵⁷ In my view, it is conceivable that παλλακή was blended with concubine names in -ίς such as Χρυσηΐς, Βρισηΐς, perhaps aided by ἄκοιτις (‘spouse’) (though that has a different accentuation).

• In Homer, ἀγκαλίς occurs only in the phrase ἐν ἀγκαλίδϵσσι (Il. 18.556, 22.503), which clearly stands in for ἐν ἀγκάλαις (unmetrical in a hexameter, but common in Classical Attic). Outside of hexametrical Greek, ἀγκαλίς does occur, but with a different meaning, ‘armful’, that is, ‘that which is carried in bent arms’ (for example, Ar. fr. 418). In fact, in Il. 18.556 both meanings are conceivable, and this ambiguity may have licensed the use of ἐν ἀγκαλίδϵσσι as a substitute for ἐν ἀγκάλαις (‘in the arms’) at Il. 22.503.

The examples discussed in this section illustrate that the idea of an inflectional contamination of θοῦρος with ἄναλκις within epic Greek is an attractive option, for which various parallels can be adduced.

VI. Accounting for the pair of forms θοῦρις with θοῦρος by means of derivation

In this final section, I argue that θοῦρις cannot have been derived from θοῦρος in a regular way, neither by derivational mechanisms that were operative within Greek, nor as an archaism inherited from the Indo-European parent language.