Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/203

 Strep. Μείρω, I divide, ὄπα, φωνὴν, voice; 'voice-dividing': what can that mean?

Soc. You have heard a wild dog howl, and a tame dog bark: tell me how they differ.

Strep. The wild dog gives a long long oo-oo, which changes like a trumpet if you push your hand up and down it; and the tame dog says bow, wow, wow, like two or three panpipes blown one after another.

Soc. Exactly; you see the tame dog is humanized: he divides his voice into syllables, as men do. 'Voice-dividing' means 'speaking in syllables'.

Strep. Oh, how clever you are!

Soc. Well then, you understand; 'Voice-dividing' means articulating.

Mr Arnold will see in the Scholiast on Iliad 1, 250, precisely this order of analysis for μέροπες. It seems to me to give not a traditional but a grammatical explanation. Be that as it may, it indicates that a Greek had to pass through exactly the same process in order to expound μέροπες, as an Englishman to get sense out of 'voice-dividing'. The word is twice used by Æschylus, who affects Homeric words, and once by Euripides (Iph. T.) in the connection πολέσιν μερόπων, where the very unusual Ionism πολέσιν shows in how Homeric a region is the poet's fancy. No other word ending in οψ except μέροψ can be confidently assigned to the root ὂψ, a voice. Ἦνοψ in