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Did the Greeks, and in particular did the Homeric poets, associate Death with the Horse? The great importance, in the archaeology of art and religion, of all associations connected with the grave, will perhaps give interest to a somewhat full discussion of this question, or rather of the single piece of evidence, upon which, so far as concerns Homer, the question seems to turn. Did the poets describe Hades, lord of Death, as ‘lord of the goodly steeds’? Is this what they meant by κλυτόπωλος? It is the purpose of this paper to show that they did not, that this interpretation is involved in difficulties and impossibilities three-fold and four-fold, has for it neither reason nor authority, and must, with all that depends upon it, be given up.
The first and perhaps sufficient objection is this. Before the epithet κλυτόπωλος could be referred to the horse, πῶλος it is plain, must have signified a horse. Now it is quite certain, though apparently not recognized, that to the composers of the Iliad and Odyssey no such word as πῶλος horse was known. They used, it is true, the word to which, by a stretch of meaning and for convenience, that sense was given by their imitators and successors; but they knew it only and strictly in what seems to have been its primitive and etymological sense, a foal, a young horse under the mother.
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- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1898
References
page 1 note 1 ἵππος is found there about 400 times; see Ebeling's Lexicon s.v. My references and statistics are largely taken from this book, though I may mention perhaps that I have read both Iliad and Odyssey through with this subject in mind.
page 2 note 1 E 654, and similarly Λ 445, Π 625.
page 3 note 1 See note on p. 4.
page 4 note 1 See Ebeling s.v. κλυτόπωλοσ-δ᾿Αρίσταρχος ἐπὶ τοῦ κλυτοπώλῳ ἀκούει κλυτὴν ἐπιπόητιν κ.τ.λ
page 6 note 1 Even the very rare examples of a feminine κλυτός are not beyond suspicion (B 742, ϵ 422): κλυτή apparently does not occur, a significant fact. In ϵ 422 the unique κλυτὸς Ἀυφιτοίτη may be an error (suggested by κλυτὸς Ἐννοσίγαιος in the next line) for θϵὸς Ἀμφιτρίτη or the like. In B 742 it is easy to restore a masculine κλυτῷ, and to account for the corruption of it.
page 7 note 1 κ 85. There is nothing inconsistent with this in the current suggestion, that the ‘meeting of night and day’ refers to the brief summer nights of the far-north. It would be on the Euxine that a Greek would probably first hear a rumour of this phenomenon.
page 11 note 1 Pind., Pyth 9, 36Google Scholarὁσία κλυτὰν χέρα οἱ προσε 
ποίαν is hardly explicable by this sense of 
or indeed by any other. That Apollo should speak, in this connexion, of his 
glorious or famous hand, has not been proved intelligible; and I believe that Pindar said 
(from 
and equivalent to 
) with a meaning natural and obvious. Aeschylus and Euripides scarcely use 
at all, and throw no light upon it.
page 13 note 1 The only sense, that is, in which the word could have been originally and deliberately invented. The reading 
with the explanation ‘Death the ranger’, must, I should think, go back, as an alternative, to the fifth century at least, and may even, as an alternative, be ‘Homeric’. But invention does not account wholly for its origin, which requires the co-operation of accident.