And so in the night-adventure of the Tenth Book, when Ulysses drags away the bodies of those Thracians whom Diomed has slain, it is to make a clear path for the horses of Rhesus which were to be carried off, that they may not take fright from treading on corpses[773];
νεκροῖς ἀμβαίνοντες· ἀήθεσσον γὰρ ἔτ’ αὐτῶν.
Throughout the chariot-race, in the Twenty-third Book, we find them uppermost in the Poet’s mind, though the drivers, being his prime heroes, are not wholly forgotten.
Even as to colour, of which Homer’s perceptions appear to have been so vague, it may be remarked, that he employs it somewhat more freely with reference to horses, than to other objects having definite form or powers of locomotion.
But his liveliest conceptions of them are with respect to motion, form, and feelings: and I suppose there is no poem like the Iliad for characteristic touches in respect to any of the three.
Beauty in inanimate nature.
It has been much debated whether the ancients generally, and whether Homer in particular, had any distinct idea of beauty in landscape.
It may be admitted, even in respect to Homer, that his similes, to which one would naturally look for proof, less commonly refer to the eye than to other faculties. They commonly turn upon sound, motion, force, or multitude: rarely, in comparison, upon colour, or even upon form; still more rarely upon colour or form in such combinations as to constitute what we call the picturesque.
It seems to me, that we may draw the best materials of a demonstration in this case from comparing his descriptions of the form of scenery by means of the outlines of countries, with his use of other epithets which he employs to denote beauty.
The country of Lacedæmon was mountainous, and it is hence termed by Homer in the Odyssey and in the Catalogue, κοιλή. (Il. ii. 581, Od. iv. 1.)