Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/172

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wellgreav'd, a spear longshadowy, battle and council man-ennobling, one's knees dear, and many other epithets. Mr Arnold most gratuitously asserts that the sense of these had evaporated to the Athenians. If that were true, it would not signify to this argument. Δαιμόνιος (possessed by an elf or dæmon) so lost its sense in Attic talk, that although Æschylus has it in its true meaning, some college tutors (I am told) render ὦ δαιμόνιε in Plato, 'my very good sir!' This is surely no good reason for mistranslating the word in Homer. If Mr Arnold could prove (what he certainly cannot) that Sophocles had forgotten the derivation of ἐϋκνημῖδες and ἐϋμμελίης, and understood by the former nothing but 'full armed' and by the latter (as he says) nothing but 'war-*like', this would not justify his blame of me for rendering the words correctly. If the whole Greek nation by long familiarity had become inobservant of Homer's 'oddities' (conceding this for the moment), that also would be no fault of mine. That Homer is extremely peculiar, even if the Greeks had become deadened to the sense of it, the proof on all sides is overpowering.

It is very quaint to say, 'the outwork (or rampart) of the teeth' instead of 'the lips'. If Mr Arnold will call it 'portentous' in my English, let him produce some shadow of reason for denying it to be portentous in Greek. Many phrases are so quaint as