Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved Lacedæmon,
Or, though they came with the rest in ships that bound through the waters,
Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of Heroes,
All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?
So said she;—they long since in Earth’s soft arms were reposing,
There, in their own dear land, their Fatherland, Lacedæmon.
English Hexameter Translations, London,
1847, p. 242.
I have changed Dr Hawtrey’s ‘Kastor’, ‘Lakedaimon’, back to the familiar ‘Castor’, ‘Lacedæmon’, in obedience to my own rule that everything odd is to be avoided in rendering Homer, the most natural and least odd of poets. I see Mr Newman’s critic in the National Review urges our generation to bear with the unnatural effect of these rewritten Greek names, in the hope that by this means the effect of them may have to the next generation become natural. For my part, I feel no disposition to pass all my own life in the wilderness of pedantry, in order that a posterity which I shall never see may one day enter an orthographical Canaan; and, after all, the real question is this: whether our living apprehension of the Greek world is more checked by meeting in an English book about the Greeks, names not spelt letter for letter as in the original Greek, or by meeting names which make us rub our eyes and call out, ‘How exceedingly odd!’
The Latin names of the Greek deities raise in most cases the idea of quite distinct personages from the personages whose idea is raised by the Greek names. Hera and Juno are actually, to every scholar’s imagination, two different people. So in all these cases the Latin names must, at any inconvenience, be abandoned when we are dealing with the Greek world. But I think it can be in the sensitive imagination of Mr Grote only, that ‘Thucydides’ raises the idea of a different man from Θουκυδίδης.