But artists have appropriated the Homeric mist not only in those cases of concealment or disappearance where Homer himself employed or would have employed it, but in cases where the spectator was to perceive something which the characters on the canvas, or some of them at least, were not to be conscious of. Minerva was visible to Achilles only, when she restrained him from committing violence against Agamemnon. “I know no other way of expressing this,” says Caylus, “than to interpose a cloud between the goddess and the other members of the council.” This is entirely contrary to the spirit of the poet. Invisibility was the natural condition of his deities. So far from any stroke of blindness or intercepting of the rays of light being necessary to render them invisible,[95] a special illumination, an increased power of human vision was needed to see them. Not only, therefore, is this cloud an arbitrary and not a natural symbol in painting, but it does not possess the clearness which, as an arbitrary sign, it should. It has a double meaning, being employed as well to make the invisible visible as to render the visible invisible. XIII. If Homer’s works were completely destroyed, and nothing remained of the Iliad and Odyssey but this series of pictures proposed by Caylus, should we from these—even supposing them to be executed by the best masters—form the same idea that we now have of the poet’s descriptive talent alone, setting aside all his other qualities as a poet? Let us take the first piece that comes to hand,—the picture of the plague.[96] What do we see on the canvas? Dead bodies, the flame of funeral pyres, the dying busied with the dead, the angry god upon a cloud discharging his arrows. The profuse wealth of the picture becomes poverty in the poet. Should we attempt to restore the text of Homer from this picture, what can we make him say? “Thereupon the wrath of Apollo was kindled, and he shot his arrows among the Grecian army. Many Greeks died, and their bodies were burned.” Now let us turn to Homer himself:[96] Ὣς ἔφατ’ εὐχόμενος, τοῦ δ’ ἔκλυε Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων, βῆ δὲ κατ’ Οὐλύμποιο καρήνων χωόμενος κῆρ, τόξ’ ὤμοισιν ἔχων ἀμφηρεφέα τε φαρέτρην. ἔκλαγξαν δ’ ἄρ’ ὀϊστοὶ ἐπ’ ὤμων χωομένοιο, αὐτοῦ κινηθέντος· ὃ δ’ ἤϊε νυκτὶ ἐοικώς. ἕζετ’ ἔπειτ’ ἀπάνευθε νεῶν, μετὰ δ’ ἰὸν ἕηκεν· δεινὴ δὲ κλαγγὴ γένετ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο. οὐρῆας μὲν πρῶτον ἐπῴχετο καὶ κύνας ἀργούς, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτ’ αὐτοῖσι βέλος ἐχεπευκὲς ἐφιεὶς βάλλ’· αἰεὶ δὲ πυραὶ νεκύων καίοντο θαμειαί.