Virgil and the Homeric Epithet

Extract

When the poet Martial regrets that he cannot express the name of his friend Ěărĭnus in Latin verse and suggests with some irony that a Greek poet, to whom nothing is impossible, would not have had the same difficulty, he illustrates his envious complaint by quoting the first two words of Iliad, v. 31—^TAρεζ, ^xAρεζ, that is the name Ares with variant quantities:

dicunt ărĭnon tamen poetae,

sed Graeci, quibus est nihil negatum

et quos ^TAρεζ, ^xAρεζ, decet sonare.

But had Martial been able to cite in his hendecasyllables the whole of that line of Homer, namely

^TAρεζ, ^xAρεζ, βρoτoλoγiγέ, μiαiϕνε, τεiχεσiπλῆτα,

he could have pointed to a much more formidable obstacle than mere quantitative incompatibility which lay in the path of every Latin poet who, almost without exception, turned for inspiration and guidance to Greek originals. The strength of this Homeric line lies in its memorable compounds, here chancing to increase in length as the line proceeds: the line is almost of the type called by the Greeks ‘rhopalic’, bludgeon-like, growing progressively in thickness towards the butt-end. Homer's music is not merely ‘winged'; it is ‘strong-wing'd’. The God of War is here called βρoτoλoιγóς, ‘mortal-plaguing’: μıαıøóνoς, ‘blood-polluted’: τειχεσιπλἡτης, ‘battlement-storming’—all these breathless mouthfuls within three-quarters of one hexameter line. Latin is usually regarded as a succinct language, a speech employing fewer words to express an organized idea than most tongues. But it would be futile to attempt to enclose within the compass of four and a half feet of a Latin hexameter the connotation of the three Greek compound adjectives, with their sixfold content—the notions of plague and mankind, pollution and murder, sacker and walled cities.