Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/26

 *ment of the poem is changed. In these lines of Chapman, for instance, from Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus, in the twelfth book of the Iliad:

O friend, if keeping back Would keep back age from us, and death, and that we might not wrack In this life's human sea at all, but that deferring now We shunned death ever,—nor would I half this vain valor show, Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance; But since we must go, though not here, and that besides the chance Proposed now, there are infinite fates, etc.

Here the necessity of making the line,

Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance,

rhyme with the line which follows it, entirely changes and spoils the movement of the passage.

οὔτε κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην, οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν·

Neither would I myself go forth to fight with the foremost, Nor would I urge thee on to enter the glorious battle,

says Homer; there he stops, and begins an opposed movement:

νῦν δ'—ἔμπης γὰρ Κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο—

But—for a thousand fates of death stand close to us always—

This line, in which Homer wishes to go away