Odyssey 17.384-17.385

The parallelism of the tektōn ‘carpenter’ with the aoidos ‘singer’ is particularly noteworthy, since the craft of the singer is conventionally compared to the craft of the carpenter. Especially relevant here is the wording in Pindar Pythian 3.113–114: here the poets of epic are compared metaphorically to tektones ‘carpenters, joiners’ who ‘join together’— as expressed by the verb-stem harmot-/harmod- —the epea ‘words’ of poetry (ἐπέων ... τέκτονες οἷα ... | ἅρμοσαν). The verb-stem harmot-/harmod- that I translate as ‘join together’ here (ἅρμοσαν) derives from the root *ar-, meaning ‘join’. Relevant is the “speaking name” (nomen loquens) of Homer, Hóm-ēros, which can be analyzed morphologically as a compounding of homo- ‘together’ with the root ar- ‘join’, meaning ‘he who joins together’ in the metaphorical sense of a ‘joiner, carpenter’. See also the note at I.05.722.