[meteorite-list] English Names of the Martian Moons

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2008 21:46:13 -0500
Message-ID: <00c801c8f900$ecb10700$f34ce146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi, John, Darren, Larry, List,

    I doubt if anyone much remembers this, but here goes.
Does anybody remember, back on July 14th:

Darren Garrison wrote:
> http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/append7.html#DwarfPlanets

Then, John Kashuba wrote:
> Off the subject, but it looks like they have crossed
> up the meaning of the names of the two Mars moons.

Then, Larry Lebofsky wrote:
> Good catch, John. Yes, I think that is backwards.
> Phobos as in Phobia.

    So, I wrote to the USGS Astrogeology Team that maintains
the IAU list of astronomical names of bodies and their English
translations, opining that they might have gotten the moons' names
backwards. They replied, "We see inconsistencies in the sources,
and the resolution is not clear" and asked for any information
I might have, so I wrote this and send it to them:

THE ENGLISH NAMES
OF THE MARTIAN MOONS

    The meaning of Phobos is easily found in any
good dictionary that gives the etymological origin
of words like phobia and phobic. It has been clearly
accepted into English as the root for terms denoting
some aspect of Fear, and such long usage firmly
establishes the English translation of Phobos as
Fear. Sort of QED. But Deimos...?

    Aphrodite gave birth to three children while
married to Hephaestos -- Phobos, Deimos, and
Harmonium -- but the actual father was Ares, and
that was the cause of a French-farce-like confrontation
(Odyssey. viii, 266-367), often cited as proof of
the disreputable nature of the Greek gods, or merely
good comedy... Hephaestos catches the illicit lovers,
in the act, in a net and exposes them to the rest
of the Gods. (So if you should ever discover a third
Martian Moon, you know what to name it, but I'm
betting poor little Harmonium never gets a Moon
named for him, as he disappears without mention
from Greek myth after his birth. The Greeks were
not big on Harmony.)

    The inevitable Wikipedia article on Deimos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deimos_(mythology)
says "In Greek mythology, Deimos (?????? - "dread")
was the personification of dread. He was the son of
Ares and Aphrodite. He, his brother Phobos and the
goddess Enyo accompanied Ares into battle, as
well as his father's attendants, Trembling, Fear,
Dread, and Panic. His Roman equivalent was
Formido or Metus. Asaph Hall, who discovered the
moons of Mars, named one Deimos, and the other
Phobos."

    That is not exactly true; Hall named them Deimus
and Phobus. (See below).

http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/AresAttendants.html
translates Deimos and Phobos as Terror and Fear, and
http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Deimos.html
shows that English translators have used a huge variety
of English words to translate both terms, so if you go
by prior nineteenth century English translations of Phobos
and Deimos, you could name them almost any way you
wanted to. "Panic" is used for both Phobos and Deimos,
so is "Fear," and so is "Rout."

    The current Brittanica (online):
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/156107/Deimos#tab=active~checked%2Citems~checked&title=Deimos%20--%20Britannica%20Online%20Encyclopedia
"...even his [Ares'] parents, however, were not fond
of him (Iliad v, 889 ff.). Nonetheless, he was accompanied
in battle, by his sister Eris (Strife) and his sons (by
Aphrodite) Phobos and Deimos (Panic and Rout).
Also associated with him were two lesser war deities:
Enyalius, who is virtually identical with Ares himself,
and Enyo, a female counterpart." Brittanica is the sole
source of these translations that I can find, and I do
not think they are trustworthy.

    However, the 11th edition of the Brittanica (1910-11,
a time much nearer to the time of Hall's naming of the
moons) gives Panic and Fear for the meanings of
Deimos and Phobos, in two places, quoted here:
http://www.jrank.org/api/search/v2?key=a43435df3b26393e298fde728f8b98c54d8cfd34&q=deimos&commit=Search

    The standard English Classic texts are the Loeb Library.
The translator of the Loeb "Iliad" was Augustus T. Murray
(1866-1940). "Professor of Greek at Stanford University for
forty years from 1892, produced his Loeb edition of the
Odyssey in 1919; the Iliad followed a few years later. No
more faithful translation of Homer was ever made, and its
elegance matched its fidelity," or so they say. He translated
Phobos and Deimos as Terror and Rout.

    There are two contenders for the best modern English
translation of the Iliad, Lattimore's (1951) and Fitzgerald's
(1974). Lattimore's is considered the more "literal" version
and he translates Phobos and Deimos as Fear and Terror.

    And so it goes; everybody does it differently. The sources
ARE inconsistent. However, all these translators are dealing
with the English names for two exceedingly minor characters
in Ancient Greek literature, daimons hardly mentioned,
and we are dealing with an astronomical name, and if things
go well with the Russian sample return mission, something
humanity could have taken a bite out of by 2009.

    Looking through dozens of astronomy websites and a
mountain of astronomy books, old and new, one finds
various translations of Deimos as Terror, Panic, Dread,
and Phobos is fairly universally translated as Fear, but
there are a very few that go with the Brittanica's Phobos
and Deimos as Panic and Rout."

    I found no reference to "Flight" until I stumbled
onto the fifth chapter of William Sheehan's excellent
book on the astronomical history of Martian observation,
now online (I have it here somewhere, in deadtree format),
"The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery"
http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/mars/chap05.htm

    Sheehan gives the quote from the Illiad as: "He spake,
and summoned Fear and Flight to yoke his steeds." It turns out
that Sheehan is quoting Asaph Hall himself on the discovery.
Here's Mr. Hall:

    "Since there is but little need of names for these satellites,
I have delayed making a selection, but to avoid confusion
I have chosen the following names: Deimus (sic) for the outer
satellite, Phobus (sic) for the inner satellite. These names were
suggested by Mr. Madan of Eton, England. They occur in
Book XV of the Iliad, line 119, where Ares is preparing to
descend to the Earth to avenge the death of his son. Bryant
translates as follows: 'He spoke, and summoned Fear and Flight
to yoke His steeds, and put his glorious armor on.' "
http://adsabs.harvard.edu//full/seri/AN.../0092//0000031.000.html

    That the naming order of the satellites in Hall's note is Deimos,
then Phobos, which is the order in which he discovered them,
the order of their luminosity, and the order of their distance from
Mars, is a fact unconnected to the fact that the passage in Homer
as translated by Bryant names them in the order Phobos, then
Deimos, the order that they occur in the "Iliad," not the other way
around. There is no doubt that Bryant meant Phobos (Fear) and
Deimos (Flight), NOT the other way around, and since Hall is
offering Bryant as his source for the names, the order given in
the USGS website is reversed from the discoverer's own name
order as he gave it.

    It's Backward.

    It may be that Bryant's translations should be "affixed" to
the Moons as it was those words that their discoverer Hall
offered up at the time, but not in the reversed order given in:
http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/append7.html

    Bryant is, of course, William Cullen Bryant, the American
poet. Bryant lived from 1794 to 1878, and he was a newspaper
man. He went to Williams College for one year before reading
the law and proceeding to a legal career. He was the editor-in-chief
(and part owner) of the New York Evening-Post for 50 years,
not principally a Greek scholar, but "a man of letters." You can
read (and/or download) his translation of the Iliad here:
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=N5H73sYXDxYC&dq=bryant+iliad&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=1g2Cwlu8Po&sig=iVgVPXWxDMcNp8LcfXi1D6WmIGU&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
(Bryant died just months after Hall announced the discovery.)

    Interestingly, the USGS Astrogeology Team's OWN
website has only one link on its Phobos and Deimos page,
one that points to the SEDS Nineplanets website for information
on Phobos and Deimos, where Phobos is translated as Fear
and Deimos is translated Panic. Guess they haven't gotten the
word yet...
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/SolarSystem/Mars/Deimos/
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/SolarSystem/Mars/Phobos/

    I searched through astronomy books back to the 1940's and
found only a parade of Fear and Dread, Fear and Terror, Fear and
Panic, astronomers taking note of the older meanings from older
books, and so on. The Bryantian "Flight" is quite rare and hardly
ever mentioned, despite the fact that Hall introduced the Moons
to us under those names.

    I believe that Bryant's names are an application of poetic
license and that the translations (which can be multiple) should
be: Phobos (Gr. for fear) and Deimos (Gr. for dread or terror).
"Flight" I reject because of the Greek "phuge" (cognitive with
the Latin "fugo"). If the Greeks meant "Flight," they would
have used it instead. Greek, unlike English, is not a language
with many generally similar terms associated with a meaning.
In Greek, meanings are specific and once named decisively,
no other word is wasted on a thing; Greek meaning is precise.

    I suspect that Bryant liked the alliteration he found by using
"Fear and Flight." Bryant's younger contemporary, Longfellow,
was more popular and made heavy use of euphonious language,
with alliteration and any other gimmick he could apply to produce
a melodic metrical result (ever read Hiawatha?). Bryant may have
been emulating him, or at least trying to compete with him.

    Why then, do I omit "Panic"?

    The term panic had a very specific meaning to the Greeks;
it refers to a nameless fear induced by the god Pan (Not Ares,
of which Mars is the Latin equivalent, and not because of any
rational fear of harm in war). An example:
    Pausanias, Description of Greece 10. 23. 7 (trans. Jones)
(Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) : "During the night there fell
on them a panic. For causeless terrors are said to come from
the god Pan."
http://www.theoi.com/Georgikos/Pan.html

    Typically, a "panic" was when one would find oneself alone
at high noon in an utterly wild place, quite uninhabited and far
from other men, and be striken by a nameless terror for no
apparent reason, "Pan-ic," and run away. The Greeks would
find the assignment of the English word "panic," derived from
"panikon deima" (Pan-caused Dread), back on Deimos (Dread)
to be a kind of repetition (Panic being a species of Dread).

    If it were necessary to settle on one translation only, I would
think: Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Dread) would be the truest
English equivalents. "Terror" is a more general term (and hence
less Greek-like), but "Dread" is a very particular kind of emotion,
a very precise hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck word.

    On the other hand, if you consider that it is more proper to
keep the English translations of the Martian Moons' names that
the discoverer himself had in his mind when he took Mr. Madan's
suggestion and supplied the quote from Bryant, then let us have
Fear and Flight.

    But please, not backward.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    I got a reply from the USGS Astrogeology Team today
on the order of the assignment of the names on the wepage.

    They wrote: "We are finding conflicting information about this,
and it doesn't seem that there is a definitive source. If we ever find
a clear answer, we'll change the page."

    So now, students, if you will skim through your textbooks for
every mention of the meaning of Phobos and Deimos, and cross
out the word "Fear" in parentheses after Phobos and write in the
word "Flight" and then cross out the word "Terror" in parentheses
after Deimos and write in the word "Fear," but PLEASE... Do it
in pencil, so we can change it back later.


Sterling K. Webb
Received on Thu 07 Aug 2008 10:46:13 PM PDT