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Others according to the habitual use of the phrase, e.g. wine and water is called wine so you get the phrase greaves of new-wrought tin;Problem: Greaves are made not of tin but of an alloy of tin and copper. Solution: Compounds are called by the name of the more important partner. Just as a mixture of wine and water is called wine, so here an alloy of tin and copper is called tin. So, too, is whisky and water called whisky. or workers in iron are called braziers, and so Ganymede is said to pour wine for Zeus, though they do not drink wine. This last might however be metaphorical.Nectar:gods :: wine: men. Therefore, according to the rules of metaphor in chapter 21, nectar may be called wine or the wine of the gods.
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Whenever a word seems to involve a contradiction, one should consider how many different meanings it might bear in the passage, e.g. in There the bronzen shaft was stayed,Hom. Il. 20.272: Nay but the weighty shaft of the warlike hero Aeneas Brake not the shield; for the gold, the gift of a god, did withstand it. Through two folds it drave, yet three were beneath, for Hephaestus, Crook-footed god, five folds had hammered; two were of bronze-work, Two underneath were of tin and one was of gold; there the bronzen Shaft of the hero was stayed in the gold. Problem: Since the gold was presumably outside for the sake of ornament, how could the spear he stayed in the gold and yet penetrate two folds? Bywater suggests as a solution that the plate of gold sufficed to stop the course of the spear, though the spear-point actually pierced it and indented the underlying plates of brass. we should ask in how many ways being stayed might be taken,
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interpreting the passage in this sense or in that, and keeping as far as possible from the attitude which GlauconThis may well be the Glaucon mentioned in Plato’s Ion as an authority on Homer. describes
