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

 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