Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And eating hoary grain and pulse, the steeds,
Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.[[25]]
[25]. Iliad, viii. 551-61 (Tennyson’s translation).
Here, as elsewhere, the simile no sooner presents itself than the poet’s imagination seizes upon and develops it without overmuch regard to the illustrative fitness of its details. The multitudinous effect of a thousand fires blazing together on the plain inevitably suggested the stars. But with the stars came the complete nocturnal scene in its profound and breathless tranquillity. The ‘rejoicing shepherd,’ meantime, who was part of it, would have been ill-pleased with the darkness required for the innumerable stellar display first thought of. And since, to the untutored sense, landscape is delightful only so far as it gives promise of utility, brilliant moonlight was added, for his satisfaction and the safety of his flock, as well as for the perfecting of that scenic beauty felt to be deficient where human needs were left uncared for. Just in proportion, however, as rocks, and peaks, and wooded glens appeared distinct, the lesser lights of heaven, and with them the fundamental idea of the comparison, must have become effaced; and the poet, accordingly, as if with a misgiving that the fervour of his fancy had led him to stray from the rigid line of his purpose, volunteered the assurance that ‘all the stars were visible’—as, to his mind’s eye, they doubtless were.
Of the ‘vivid planets’ thrown in by Pope there is no more trace in the original, than of the ‘glowing pole.’ Nor could there be; since Homer was totally ignorant that such a class of bodies existed. This curious fact affords (if it were needed) conclusive proof of the high antiquity of the Homeric poems. Not the faintest suspicion manifests itself in them that Hesperus, ‘fairest of all stars set in heaven,’ is but another aspect of Phosphorus, herald of light upon the earth, ‘the star that saffron-mantled Dawn cometh after, and spreadeth over the salt sea.’[[26]] The identification is said by Diogenes Laertius to have been first made by Pythagoras; and it may at any rate be assumed with some confidence that this elementary piece of astronomical knowledge came to the Greeks from the East, with others of a like nature, in the course of the seventh or sixth century B.C. Astonishing as it seems that they should not have made the discovery for themselves, there is no evidence that they did so. Hesiod appears equally unconscious with Homer of the distinction between ‘fixed’ and ‘wandering’ stars. According to his genealogical information, Phosphorus, like the rest of the stellar multitude, sprang from the union of Astræus with the Dawn,[[27]] but no hint is given of any generic difference between them.