ABSTRACT
Matthew Arnold in 1860, in his famous three lectures On Translating Homer, had thought it urgent that some vernacular cadence be found which might be adequate to the Homeric moral qualities: Homer, he said, is rapid, Homer is plain-spoken, Homer is plain-thinking, Homer is noble. Scholars brought up in the contemporary schools of romantic literature found little difficulty in detecting myth and symbolism in such stories and fitting them, as the Romanticists of the Hellenistic Age have done, into cosmologies and theogonies based on the common stock of more obvious nature-myths. Much of the detail with which he filled the text is either topographical, so that a careful future reader might tell which street intersects with which, and some day be able to put names to the bridges and quays and traces of paving in a ruined townsite, or else minutely domestic, as if to help with the identification of fragments in a kitchen midden.
