3. This is also one among very few cases of an ordinary birth, where the mother (Aglaïe) is named as well as the father (Charopos): the others are usually cases of reputed descent from deities or heroes.
4. The names given to both parents are taken from their personal beauty. They thus enhance the title of the son; and, as we cannot well suppose them connected with history, they were probably invented by the Poet for that purpose.
5. The repetition of the name of Nireus thrice, and in each case at the beginning of the verse, the most prominent and emphatic part of it according to the genius of the Greek hexameter, is plainly intentional.
6. All this care is taken in the most ingenious manner to mark a man, who did nothing to enable Homer to name him in any other part of the Iliad.
One and one only key is to be found, which will lay open the cause of these singular provisions: it is Homer’s intense love of beauty, which made it in his eyes of itself a title to celebrity. So he determined, apparently, that the paragon of form should be immortal; and he has given effect to his determination, for no reader of the Iliad can pass by the place without remembering Nireus.
In a less marked manner, he has given a kindred emphasis to the case of Nastes, who wore golden ornaments, and therefore was presumably of strikingly handsome person. With his brother Amphimachus he commanded the Carians, and his name is mentioned thrice (but that of his brother twice only), together with the fact that he wore gold like a girl[757].
There is something, as it appears to me, most tender and refined, in this mode used by Homer of fastening attention through repetition of the word, which he wishes gently but firmly to stamp upon the memory. We have another instance of it in Il. xxii. 127,
ἅτε παρθένος ἠΐθεός τε,
παρθένος ἠΐθεός τ’ ὀαρίζετον ἀλλήλοιϊν.
There is yet another passage which affords a striking proof of what may be called the worship of beauty in Homer. In the Seventeenth Iliad, Euphorbus, the son of Panthoos, falls by the hand of Menelaus. Homer gives him great credit for charioteering, the use of the spear, and other accomplishments; but he performs no other feat in the poem than that of wounding in the back the disarmed, and astounded, and heaven-deserted Patroclus. At best, we must call him a very secondary personage. Though his personal comeliness was not defaced like that of Paris by cowardice or vice, still he was of the same race that in Italy has taken its name from Zerbino. Yet Homer adorns his death with a notice, perhaps more conspicuous than any which he has attached to the death of any warriors of the Iliad, with the exceptions of Hector, Sarpedon, and Patroclus. Ten of the most beautiful lines of the poem are bestowed in lamenting him, chiefly by an unsurpassed simile, which compares the youth to a tender olive shoot, the victim, when its blossoms are overcharged with moisture, of a sudden hurricane. The Poet was moved to this tenderness by the remembrance of his beauty, of his hair, like the hair of the Graces, in its tresses bound with golden and silver clasps[758].