original sens of ἑκηβόλος, an epiklesis of Apollon

Question

I was very surprised to learn (in LSJ s.v. ἑκηβόλος) that ἑκηβόλος originally meant "attaining his aim" and not "far-shooter" as I always thought.

If the Liddell-Scott-Jones recalls the later interpretation of the word (ἑκη- < ἑκάς=far), this dictionary doesn't explain the original form, hence my questions :

(a) What's the etymology of "ἑκη-" ?

(b) Do we know some Greek authors explaining how they understand the epiklesis ?

addendum : I found here a good(?) analysis of another problem concerning the epiklesis "ἑκατηβόλος". According to Dominique Thillaud, ἑκη- can be...

• either (ϝ)ἑκάς as the Ancients thought; but if, as Chantraine said, ἑκάς comes from *swe-kas (reflexive pronoun + distributive κας as in ἀνδρακάς) we can't get the ἑκατη- at the beginning of ἑκατηβόλος.

• either (ϝ)εκών, (ϝ)εκόντος as in ἑκάεργος (who acts of his own free will) or as in ἑκηβόλος (who shoots of his own free will). It's Dominique Thillaud's preferred hypothesis.

Answer 1

Your addendum is about as good of an answer as I can give! But if it helps at all…

The second half of ἑκηβόλος is nice and straightforward: it comes from βάλλω, "to throw, shoot, attack from a distance". So the compound as a whole means "someone who shoots hekē".

As for the first part, I've seen three different hypotheses.

The first is that it's the preposition ἐκ, "out of". In this case it would be an intensifier, or something like that: "someone who shoots away from something". But this hypothesis has a pretty glaring flaw, namely, the rough breathing in ἑκηβόλος. I feel confident discarding that as a later folk etymology.

The second is that it's the adverb ἑκάς, "far away". This would give the famous "far-shooter" meaning, and the alpha in the prefix makes sense: LSJ reports the Doric form as ἑκᾱβόλος, indicating that the eta is just an Attic development.

The third is that it's the adjective ἑκών, "willing". This is the one LSJ prefers, and could potentially mean "someone who shoots willingly", or "someone who shoots what he intends to shoot", or something like that. But to me, this one isn't as convincing as "far-shooter"—and despite Thillaud's argument, I don't see how the extra -ᾱτ- would get in here, either.

As to why LSJ prefer the third interpretation over the second, I really can't say. Historically, those two prefixes would have looked the same all the way up to Koinē times (they both used to have a digamma, which became a rough breathing, then vanished), and ancient sources on etymology tend to be…unreliable at best. (If you want some wonderfully inaccurate folk etymologies, on the other hand, see Plato's Cratylus for a trove of them.) So I would say, take whichever makes more semantic sense to you; that's one of Thillaud's main criteria in preferring "willing", and really my main reason for preferring "far".

Answer 2

i think it's rather the same—if you fling far and do hit, you're attaining your aim, right? from the letters, it just means 'there-throwing'.