lor
merely: it is blue fire and cannot be painted" (Mod. P. iv. p. 36); but
it was this that the Greeks chiefly felt of it, and so "Glaukopis"
chiefly means gray-eyed: gray standing for a pale or luminous blue; but
it only means "owl-eyed" in thought of the roundness and expansion, not
from the color; this breath and brightness being, again, in their moral
sense typical of the breadth, intensity, and singleness of the sight in
prudence ("if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of
light"). Then the actual power of the bird to see in twilight enters
into the type, and perhaps its general fineness of sense. "Before the
human form was adopted, her (Athena's) proper symbol was the owl, a bird
which seems to surpass all other creatures in acuteness of organic
perception, its eye being calculated to observe objects which to all
others are enveloped in darkness, its ear to hear sounds distinctly, and
its nostrils to discriminate effluvia with such nicety that it has been
deemed prophetic, from discovering the putridity of death even in the
first stages of disease."*

* Payne Knight in his "Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient
Art," not trustworthy, being little more than a mass of conjectural
memoranda, but the heap is suggestive, if well sifted.

I cannot find anywhere an account of the first known occurrence of the
type; but, in the early ones on Attic coins, the wide round eyes are
clearly the principal things to be made manifest.

94. There is yet, however, another color of great importance in the
conception of Athena--the dark blue of her aegis. Just as the blue or
gray of her eyes was conceived more as light than color, so her aegis was
dark blue, because the Greeks thought of this tint more as shade than
color, and, while they used various materials in ornamentation,
lapislazuli, carbonate of copper, or, perhaps, smalt, with real enjoyment
of the blue tint, it was yet in their minds as distinctly representative
of darkness as scarlet was of light, and, therefore, anything dark,* but
especially the color of heavy thunder-cloud, was described by the same
term. The physical power of this darkness of the aegis, fringed with
lightning, is given quite simply when Jupiter himself uses it to
overshadow Ida and the Plain of Troy, and withdraws it at the prayer of
Ajax for light; and again when he grants it to be worn for a time by
Apollo, who is hidden by its cloud when he strikes down Patroclus