e. For the olive-wood club of the Cyclops in Od. ix. 320, 379. Here, for the first time, we find the word applied to an object that might perhaps be called green. But still there are two observations to be made. First, even the leaf of the olive is rather grey than green: and this is the bark, not the leaf, which is yet more grey, and yet less green. Secondly, the governing idea is not the greenness, but the newness: for Ulysses says that he heated it in the ashes until it was about to take fire, χλωρός περ ἐών; although freshly cut, and still seething with the sap.
f. The derivative χλωρηῒς is applied to the nightingale in Od. xix. 518, as a lover of the woods: and here the idea of greenness seems to be rather less faintly indicated.
Upon the whole, then, χλωρὸς indicates rather the absence than the presence of definite colour, although it is derived from χλοὴ, meaning young herbage. If regarded as an epithet of colour, it involves at once an hopeless contradiction between the colour of honey on the one side, and greenness on the other. Again, the more we assume it to mean green, the more startling it becomes that it could have taken paleness, as is manifestly the case, for its governing idea. Next to paleness, it serves chiefly for freshness, i. e. as opposed to what is stale or withered: a singular combination with the former sense. The idea of green we scarcely find, unless once, connected with this word in the poems of Homer: and yet it is a remarkable fact that there is no other word in the poems that can even be supposed to represent a colour, which, not the rainbow only, but every day nature, presents so largely to the eye.
8. I take next the word αἰθαλόεις. The Homeric sense of this word seems somewhat to resemble that of κυάνεος; although there is the difference between them, that the derivation here is from αἰθάλη, soot.
This epithet is applied by Homer, in sufficient conformity, as is contended, with the idea of soot,
a. To the interior of the palace of Ulysses, Od. xxii. 239, and to that of Priam, Il. ii. 415. In the latter case the word will, as it appears from the context, bear to be construed with reference to the state of a house blackened by a conflagration.
b. To the dark ash κόνις αἰθαλόεσσα, which Achilles poured over his head, Il. xviii. 23, and which, in ver. 25, is called μέλαινα τέφρη: this material Laertes also used for the same purpose in Od. xxiv. 315. Yet the propriety of the second of these two applications depends, first, upon the rather hardy supposition, that both Achilles and Laertes had by them, at the moment of their sorrow, the remains of a wood-fire; and, secondly, upon the assumption that the word κόνις may mean fire-ashes as well as dust in general. But we may doubt both of these assumptions; while, if κόνις means ‘dust,’ and αἰθαλόεις ‘sooty,’ it becomes plain that this epithet is used, like others, with very great latitude.
9. It may be admitted that, at a first view, the words ῥοδόεις and ῥοδοδάκτυλος would appear to be in the strictest sense epithets of colour. But it still would seem that they add nothing to Homer’s defective means of expressing it: and not only so, but, in fact, scanty as is their use, it is so little congruous, that we are driven to suppose he must have employed these words in a sense not only elastic, but altogether indeterminate and purely figurative.
Ῥοδοδάκτυλος, or rosy-fingered, has become, through Homer’s example and authority, a classical epithet for the morning. It is, however, more open to criticism than is usually the case with the Homeric epithets. There is nothing strange in personifying Morn, in order to embellish her with an epithet belonging to personal beauty; but redness, applied to the fingers, and not merely to their tips, is more than equivocal in this respect, since that colour is only even admissible in the interior of the hand, which is the part not seen, and therefore presumably the part not intended in ῥοδοδάκτυλος.
There are certain very fugitive tints of the sky, which approach to the hue of the rose: but if Homer had the colour of that flower definitely in his view, it is most singular that he should never use it, either for the human form or otherwise, except on this and one other occasion only.