Here we may assume that by αἰγίβοτος, goat-feeding, he means mountainous, and even sharp and rocky; moreover consequently, in comparison, barren, so that it could not be agreeable in the sense of being profitable. On the other hand, the horse is an animal ill-suited to range among rocks; and by ἱππόβοτος Homer always means a district or country sufficiently open and plain to be suitable for feeding horses in numbers. Now, in saying that Arran is more ἐπήρατος than southern Lancashire, we should leave no doubt upon the mind of any reader as to the meaning; which must surely be that it offers more beauty to the eye. Just such a comparison does Homer make of the scenery of Ithaca as it was with what it would have been, if the island had been flat.
I ought however to notice the very forced interpretation of Damm, which is this: μᾶλλον ἐπήρατος, sc. ἐμοὶ, nam est patria mea; et ad μᾶλλον subintelligit τοῦ σοῦ Ἄργεος φίλη μοι ἔστι.
Homer was better versed in the art of wedding words to thought, than such an interpretation supposes. For, according to it, the thought of Homer was this; ‘Though you rule over broad and open Argos, my mountainous Ithaca is dearer to me, because it is my country.’ So that he has left out the point of the sentence, without the faintest trace to guide his reader. The idea of the sentence, which is prolonged through many verses, turns entirely on the difference between an open and a steep rocky country as such, and not in the least on native attachments. And Telemachus, who is lauding the richness and fertility of Argos, and apologizing for the barrenness of Ithaca, not ungracefully, in passing, throws in, by way of compensation, the element of beauty, as one possessed by Ithaca, and as one which it must miss if it were flat.
Indeed, we here trace the usual refinement of Homer in this, that Telemachus does not say, True, your Argos is rich, but my Ithaca is picturesque: but, after commending the fertility of broad Argos, he says, ‘In Ithaca we have no broad runs[776], and nothing like a meadow: it will feed nothing but goats, yet it is more picturesque than if it, a little speck of that kind, were flat and open.’
The word ἐπήρατος is less frequently used in Homer than ἐρατεινός; but we have it in six places besides this. There is only one of them where it is capable of meaning dear, in connection with the idea of country[777]. In another it means enjoyable or splendid, being applied to the banquet[778]. In the other places it is applied to a town on the Shield, a cavern in Ithaca (twice), and the garments put upon Venus in Cyprus; and in those four places it can only mean fair or beautiful.
We are not, then, justified in limiting Homer’s sense of natural beauty to what was associated with utility[779]. On the contrary, it appears plainly to extend to beauty proper, and even to that kind of beauty in nature which we of the present day most love.
I have dealt thus far with the most doubtful part of the question, and have ventured to dissent from Mr. Ruskin, whose authority I admit, and of whose superior insight, as well as of his extraordinary powers of expression, I am fully conscious.
Germ of feeling for the picturesque.
Mr. Ruskin thinks[780] that ‘Homer has no trace of feeling for what we call the picturesque’; that Telemachus apologizes for the scenery of Ithaca; and that rocks are never loved but as caves. I think that the expressions I have produced from the text show that these propositions cannot be sustained. At the same time I admit that the feeling with Homer is one in the bud only: as, indeed, until within a very few generations, it has lain undeveloped among ourselves. Homer may have been the father of this sentiment for his nation, as he was of so much besides. But the plant did not grow up kindly among those who followed him.
I assent entirely, on the other hand, to what Mr. Ruskin has said respecting his sense of orderly beauty in common nature. The garden of Alcinous is truly Dutch in its quadrangular conceptions; but it is plain that the Poet means us to regard it as truly beautiful[781]. Symmetry, serenity, regularity, adopted from the forms of living beauty which were before him, enter largely into Homer’s conceptions of one form, at least, of inanimate beauty.