There is nothing for it in the case of Homer but a prose
translation. Even in prose to find perfect equivalents for some of the
Homeric phrases is not easy. Whatever the chronological date of the
Homeric poems may be, their political and psychological date may be
pretty well fixed. Politically they belong, as the episode of
Thersites shows, to the rise of democracy and to its first collision
with aristocracy, which Homer regards with the feelings of a bard who
sang in aristocratic halls. Psychologically they belong to the time
when in ideas and language, the moral was just disengaging itself from
the physical. In the wail of Andromache for instance, _adinon epos_,
which Pope improves into "sadly dear," and Cowper, with better taste at
all events, renders "precious," is really semi-physical, and scarcely
capable of exact translation. It belongs to an unreproducible past,
like the fierce joy which, in the same wail, bursts from the savage
woman in the midst of her desolation at the thought of the numbers whom
her husband's hands had slain.
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