After this
Deiphobus marries Helen, Odysseus brings Neoptolemus from Scyros and gives him his father's arms, and the ghost of Achilles appears to him.
The next company was led by Paris, Alcathous, and Agenor; the third by Helenus and
Deiphobus, two sons of Priam, and with them was the hero Asius--Asius, the son of Hyrtacus, whose great black horses of the breed that comes from the river Selleis had brought him from Arisbe.
{43} At that moment you came up to us; some god who wished well to the Trojans must have set you on to it and you had
Deiphobus with you.
Of the same sort is the proposition: "Helen had three husbands" for neither when she had Menelaus as a husband in Sparta, nor when she had Paris in Ilium, nor finally when, after his death, she married
Deiphobus was the present "she has three husbands" true; and yet, the preterit "she had three husbands" is true.
(45) There are three instances from the Iliad, all using the same formulaic language, where gods liken themselves to humans in voice and build: Poseidon assimilating to Calchas at 13.45 ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), Athena to Phoenix at 17.555 ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), and Athena to
Deiphobus at 22.227 ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]).
Athena disguised herself as
Deiphobus, fooling Hector--
And within the central, all-too-human cast of the hypermyth, perhaps no characters are more important than the several sets of brothers who populate his tale: Agamemnon and Menelaus, Hector and Paris (or
Deiphobus or any of King Priam's fifty princely sons), and even, in a symbolic sense, Achilles and Patroclus, to say nothing of half-brothers such as Telamonian Ajax and Teucer.
If anything, Virgil's account of the treacherous disfigurement of
Deiphobus (6.494-530) is Heaney's distant model.
when along you came, Helen--roused, no doubt, by a dark power bent on giving Troy some glory, and dashing Prince
Deiphobus squired your every step.
In Book 6,
Deiphobus, appearing as a mangled ghost, has "populataque tempora raptis auribus" (a phrase breathy with short a-sounds), literally "ravaged temples and ears stolen away" Do you meld a doubled, pleonastic expression into something simple, raping Virgil's style to get a trouble-free twentieth-century-sounding one?
(23) McKay Sundwall, "
Deiphobus and Helen: A Tantalizing Hint," MP 73 (1975): 151-6; John M.