"Kissing the hands". A debated gesture, the winners and the losers

The two most remarkable contemporary Nachdichtungen of Iliad XXIV both focus on Priamos' gesture of supplication towards Achilles. The exact mechanism of this gesture, which Homer describes in lines 478-479 and 504-506 of book XXIV, has raised various doubts among modern scholars, chiefly because of the two possible syntactical interpretations of line 506. A hitherto neglected scholium to this line (recovered from the margins of an incunable, and penned by no less a scholar than Guillaume Budé) may help reconstruct the ancient controversy on the specific Homeric line, and thus invite a fresh consideration of the related philological debate, as well as of the wider micro- A nd macro-structure of book XXIV, as concerns its ideological implications and the idea of the reciprocity and role-exchange between the winners and the defeated, under the shadow of an inescapable condicio humana.