The irrealis in Homer: is there internal evidence for the optative being the older mood in this construction?

In Homeric Greek both the indicative and the optative can be used to describe wishes and modal constructions that refer to the past and/or that are unfulfillable (the unfulfillable wishes on the one hand and the potential of the past and counterfactuals of present and past on the other) and this in contradistinction to Attic Greek, where the indicative is the only mood (with a very small number of exceptions). For the co-existence of the optative and the indicative (this indicative is called the "modal indicative") several explanations have been given, one of them being that that the optative was the original mood (which would be supported by the comparative evidence of other Indo-European languages) and that the indicative ousted it because the former was more suited to indicate the pastness of the statement. In this article I first then give an overview of the scholarship of the Homeric moods (focusing on the so-called irrealis-continua), then describe the problem and briefly list the different suggestions made for the co-occurrence of optative and indicative and then investigate whether or not there is internal evidence in the Odyssey to corroborate or refute that the optative was the oldest mood. I analyse all the modal indicatives and check if they can contain an older optative, and at the end I discuss three instances in which both the optative as the indicative had been transmitted. This article finds that in a majority of cases the indicative does indeed contain (or "hide") an older optative, thus providing additional evidence for the substitution theory.