Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/185

 he calls Balius Spotted and Podarga Spry-*foot: which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale ''Madlle. Rossignol, or Mr Bright M. Clair'''. He is very wanting in discrimination. If I had translated Hector into Possessor or Agamemnon into Highmind, his censure would be just. A Miss White may be a brunette, a Miss Brown may be a blonde: we utter the proper names of men and women without any remembrance of their intrinsic meaning. But it is different with many names of domestic animals. We never call a dog Spot, unless he is spotted; nor without consciousness that the name expresses his peculiarity. No one would give to a black horse the name Chesnut; nor, if he had called a chesnut horse by the name Chesnut, would he ever forget the meaning of the name while he used it. The Greeks called a chesnut horse xanthos and a spotted horse balios; therefore, until Mr Arnold proves the contrary, I believe that they never read the names of Achilles' two horses without a sense of their meaning. Hence the names ought to be translated; while Hector and Laomedon ought not. The same reasoning applies to Podarga, though I do not certainly understand ἀργός. I have taken it to mean sprightly.

Mr Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never 'garrulous'. Allowing that too many others agree with me, he attributes our error to giving too much weight to a sentence in