Wednesday, September 20, 2023
The Gift of Clear Sight
Homer, Iliad 5.127-128 (Athena to Diomedes; tr. A.T. Murray):
Edgar Allan Poe quoted from line 127 in the second paragraph of his short story "The Man of the Crowd," but he seems to have thought that ἀχλύς was masculine (it's feminine):
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And the mist moreover have I taken from thine eyes that afore was upon them,See Derek Collins, "The Magic of Homeric Verses," Classical Philology 103.3 (July 2008) 211-236 (passim).
to the end that thou mayest well discern both god and man.
ἀχλὺν δ᾽ αὖ τοι ἀπ᾽ ὀφθαλμῶν ἕλον, ἣ πρὶν ἐπῆεν,
ὄφρ᾽ εὖ γιγνώσκῃς ἠμὲν θεὸν ἠδὲ καὶ ἄνδρα.
Edgar Allan Poe quoted from line 127 in the second paragraph of his short story "The Man of the Crowd," but he seems to have thought that ἀχλύς was masculine (it's feminine):
For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui — moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs — the αχλυς ος πριν επηεν — and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias.
