These lines were athetized by Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus, two great directors of the library in Ptolemaic Alexandria in the second century BCE. Aristarchus was considered the premier editor of Homer in antiquity, and the scholia that survive in our medieval manuscripts of the Iliad and Odyssey are full of references to him. As Gregory Nagy has demonstrated (see especially Nagy 2004), Aristarchus had available to him at the library of Ptolemaic Alexandria a great number of Homeric texts. Aristarchus’ practice was to collate the many texts known to him and to comment on the various readings that he found, often asserting which reading he felt to be the correct one. Unlike a modern editor, however, Aristarchus confined his opinions to his commentary, which was published in its own separate volume. The notes in the commentary were linked to the appropriate passages in the text by means of a system of critical signs. These signs are preserved in the Venetus A manuscript of Homer, and to a lesser extent elsewhere (see Bird 2009). So here, although both Aristarchus and his predecessor Aristophanes did not feel verses 51–52 were composed by Homer, they left them in the text, and indicated their judgment with the sign for athetesis (see Figure 4). The scholia in the margins of the Venetus A tell us that Aristarchus condemned 10.51 because it repeats the content of 10.49, and because δηθά and δολιχόν mean the same thing. There is a tendency among the Alexandrian editors to disapprove of verses that they feel to be repetitive, preferring compression over expansion. This preference for compression is rooted in the poetics of their day (see Dué 2001a), and does not offer us good grounds for condemning the lines. But it is noteworthy that these scholars did not impose their preferences on the text itself, with the result that much more Homeric poetry survives for us today than probably would have otherwise.