93.  There is precisely a similar confusion between light and color in the word used for the blue of the eyes of Athena—­a noble confusion, however, brought about by the intensity of the Greek sense that the heaven is light, more than it is blue.  I was not thinking of this when I wrote in speaking of pictorial chiaroscuro, “The sky is not blue color 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; but its spiritual power is chiefly expressed by a word signifying deeper shadow,—­the gloom of Erebus, or of our evening, which, when spoken of the aegis, signifies, not merely the indignation of