Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/199

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

form εὐμελίας is only to be found in grammars. He is here, as always, wrong in his facts. The word is most singular in Greek; more singular by far than 'ashen-spear'd' in English, because it is more obscure, as is its special application to one or two persons: and in truth I have doubted whether we any better understand Eumelian Priam than Gerenian Nestor.—Mr Arnold presently imputes to me the opinion that χιτὼν means 'a cloak', which he does not dispute; but if I had thought it necessary to be literal, I must have rendered χαλκο-*χίτωνες brazen-shirted. He suggests to me the rendering 'brazen-coated', which I have used in Il. 4, 285 and elsewhere. I have also used 'brazen-clad', and I now prefer 'brazen-mail'd'. I here wish only to press that Mr Arnold's criticism proceeds on a false fact. Homer's epithet was not a familiar word at Athens (in any other sense than as Burns or Virgil may be familiar to Mr Arnold), but was strange, unknown even to their poets; hence his demand that I shall use a word already familiar in English poetry is doubly baseless. The later poets of Greece have plenty of words beginning with χαλκο-; but this one word is exclusively Homer's.—Everything that I have now said, may be repeated still more pointedly concerning ἐϋκνημῖδες, inasmuch as directing attention to leg-armour is peculiarly quaint. No one in all Greek literature (as