Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/40

 And this striking picture has been thus translated by a recent and celebrated scholar :

This it will be readily perceived is an error. The passage, literally rendered, ought to read something like the following : ‘Foot on foot and horse on horse, they perished forcibly while flying; and under them the dust arose from the plain, and the loud-sounding (crushing or thundering) feet of the horses raised it.’

The word is ἐρίγδουποι. Another translator of the Iliad renders this passage :

In another place (Book viii., lines 44-5) Bourgelat, Cuming, and others, found their opinion in favour of the Greeks having shod their horses at this early period, on the fact that Homer speaks of Jove's horses as

The translation of χαλχόποδ’ ῖππω is correct, and is rendered so by Chapman, an old versifier :

The ‘brass-hoof’ was undoubtedly used by Homer in a metaphorical sense to denote firmness and solidity, not