"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I have gone through Homer's Iliad—sorry to have finished it. The accounts of the Zoolu people, with Dingarn their king, etc., {64} give one a very good idea of the Homeric heroes, who were great brutes: but superior to the Gods who governed them: ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... own we'd give a leg if we could borrow, steal, or beg the skill old Homer used to show. (He wrote the Iliad, you know.) Old Homer swung a wicked pen, but we are ordinary men, and cannot even start to dream of doing justice to our theme. The subject of that great repast is too magnificent and vast. We can't describe (or even try) the way those ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... I appeared for my entrance examination at the New Year (1828) thought fit to maintain the dignity of their school by placing me for a time in the upper third form, whereas at the Kreuz Grammar School in Dresden I had been in the second form. My disgust at having to lay aside my Homer—from which I had already made written translations of twelve songs—and take up the lighter Greek prose writers was indescribable. It hurt my feelings so deeply, and so influenced my behaviour, that ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... us that the Greek Rhapsodists could not recite Homer without falling into convulsions," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... to spend a night in some remote mountain-village of Greece, and see Americanism and Hellenism face to face. Hellenism is represented by the village schoolmaster. He wears a black coat, talks a little French, and can probably read Homer; but his longest journey has been to the normal school at Athens, and it has not altered his belief that the ikon in the neighbouring monastery was made by St. Luke and the Bulgar beyond the mountains by the Devil. On the other side of you sits the returned emigrant, chattering irrepressibly in ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... students have done, as students, it is stark naught. When the men did anything, it was after they had left the academy, and began thinking for themselves. There is only one picture among the many hundreds that has, to my idea, much merit (a charming composition of Homer singing, signed Jourdy); and the only good that the Academy has done by its pupils was to send them to Rome, where they might learn better things. At home, the intolerable, stupid classicalities, taught by men who, belonging to the least erudite country in Europe, were themselves, from ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Poseidon, a monster mentioned in Homer and later identified with the whirlpool Charybdis, in the Strait of Messina off the NE coast of Sicily. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... whence I sprung, War's dusty honours I pursue not young? Or that I study not the tedious laws, And prostitute my voice in every cause? Thy scope is mortal; mine eternal fame, Which through the world shall ever chaunt my name. Homer will live whilst Tenedos stands, and Ide, Or, to the sea, fleet Simois doth slide: And so shall Hesiod too, while vines do bear, Or crooked sickles crop the ripen'd ear. Callimachus, though in invention low, Shall still be ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... who cares for you; but, as Homer represents Minerva as taking away darkness from the eyes of Diomedes; that he might distinguish a God from a man, so it is necessary that he should first take away the darkness from your mind, and then bring near those things by which you shall ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... express compendiously the characteristics, of the situation in which mankind disclose themselves at the dawn of their history, I should be satisfied to quote a few verses from the "Odyssee" of Homer:— ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... know," said Kate; and seeing that her aunt did not know, she went on to say, "there are notes and explanations. And there is a Homer—an English one, you know; and we play ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... train and harmonize and limber the physical powers, that the superior quality of study would, I doubt not, more than atone for whatever deficiency in quantity might result. And even suppose a little less attention should be given to Euclid and Homer, which is of the greater importance nowadays, an ear that can detect a false quantity in a Greek verse, or an eye that can sight a Rebel nine hundred yards off, and a hand that can pull a trigger and shoot him? Knowledge is power; but knowledge must sharpen its edges ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... ninety-eight per cent. don't care a continental damn for Shakespeare or anybody else, barring Mary Jane Holmes, of course, and the five-cent story papers. But literary Des Moines is literary. They stand by Shakespeare and Homer, I can tell you, and they recognize genius when they see it. By the way, Bergen," he said, calling his brother-in-law to him again, "we must make this young man acquainted with ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... it will be remembered, was but imperfectly appreciated by Homer's contemporaries. Milton's "Paradise Lost" was so lightly regarded when first written, that the author received but twenty-five pounds for it. Ben Jonson was for some time blind to the beauties of ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... daily tasks and made of the world "a dance through life, a perpetual gala-day."[69] Keats could not have romped through the "Faerie Queene" with more spirit than did Hazlitt through the length and breadth of eighteenth century romance, and the young poet's awe before the majesty of Homer was hardly greater than that of the future critic when a Milton or a Wordsworth swam into his ken. This hot and eager interest, deprived of its outlet in the form of direct emulation, sought a vent in communicating itself to others and in making converts ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... approval were read from John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor, of England; Professor Homer B. Sprague, of Cornell University; Bishop Simpson, of the Methodist church; Senator Matthew H. Carpenter, and many other distinguished persons. A number of senators and representatives addressed the meetings, as did also Hon. A.G. Riddle, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... after genius ceased to soar to the heights of philosophy and poetry. The proudest triumphs of genius are in a realm which art can never approach, yet the wonders of art are still among the great triumphs of civilization. Zeuxis or Praxiteles may not have equaled Homer or Plato in profundity of genius, but it was only a great age which could have produced a Zeuxis or Praxiteles. I cannot place Raphael on so exalted a pinnacle as Luther, or Bacon, or Newton, and yet his fame will last as long as civilization ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... opinions, but this is no place to present them. I seek to describe simply the great battle of the Middle Ages, and you can draw your own conclusions as to the merits of the respective causes. I present the battle of heroes,—a battle worthy of the muse of Homer. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... (how indeed should you?), march many mystical phantoms that are not of this base world. Pale HELEN steps out upon the battlements and turns to FLAUBERT her appealing glance, and CELLINI paces with Madame DE SEVIGNE through the eternal shadows of unrevealed realism. And BROWNING, and HOMER, and MEREDITH, and OSCAR WILDE are with them, the fleet-footed giants of perennial youth, like unto the white-limbed Hermes, whom Polyxena once saw, and straight she hied her away to the vine-clad banks of Ilyssus, where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... whole pages of this poem by heart. It will live as long as Russian literature exists; and its artistic value as an instrument for the depiction of Russian nature and the soul of the Russian people can be compared only with that of the great epics of Homer with regard to the legendary ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... their death, they never whimper. When you come right down to hard facts, the courage and the endurance of the British and the French excel anything ever before seen on this planet. All the old stories of bravery from Homer down are outdone every day by these people. I see these British at close range, full-dress and undress; and I've got to know a lot of 'em as well as we can ever come to know anybody after we get grown. There is simply no end to the silly sides of their character. But, when the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... What people commonly call Fate is, as a general rule, nothing but their own stupid and foolish conduct. There is a fine passage in Homer,[1] illustrating the truth of this remark, where the poet praises [GREEK: maetis]—shrewd council; and his advice is worthy of all attention. For if wickedness is atoned for only in another world, stupidity gets its reward here—although, ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast; and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus in the Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts, over the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... no place for the God of the Bible, nor for the Bible of the only living and true God. The poetry of Homer and Horace are sufficiently honored, but the finer poetry of Moses, Job and David are unknown in the courses of study of our schools, except now and then as specimens of Oriental song. The wise sayings of Plato ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... soothingly upon his thought and fancy, and plunged him into those reveries, so dear alike to poet and mathematician. To the thinker the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer's chain, extend, link after link; from earth to heaven. The sunny motes, that in a glancing column came through the lattice, called Warner from the real day,—the day of strife and blood, with thousands hard by driving each other to the Hades,—and led his scheming ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thieves ransacked the library and got very little for their pains. The whole place was turned upside down, drawers burst open and presses ransacked, with the result that an odd volume of Pope's 'Homer,' two plated candlesticks, an ivory letter-weight, a small oak barometer, and a ball of twine, are all that ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Yet the Homer of sex through the ages is still to come. But at all times the mystery evoked speculation and attempt at explanation. Acting upon their theories as to the nature and function of sex, men have, ever since the passing of the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... opposing hosts. In the school the plans for the campaign were perfected, and when it was out they met in the White Garden, known to the directory as Tompkins Square, the traditional duelling-ground of the lower East Side; and there ensued such a battle as Homer would have ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... in 1900, wrote a paper on this "Atene Siciliana" which I have not seen. The whole question is discussed in Filangieri's recent history of Massa (1908-1910). It also occurs to me that Strabo's term akron may mean an extremity or point projecting into the sea (a sense in which Homer used it), and be applicable, therefore, to ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... of leisure. But that may represent a degenerate condition rather than anything necessary. Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things. It has had an enormous patriotic value. Homer to the Greeks was a Bible, a textbook of morals, a history, and a national inspiration. In any case, it may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... said, 'that it is a bracing place; that Homer—isn't it a funny name for a woman, it was her surname, and the boys used to call her all manner of nonsense because of it—"Iliad" and "Odyssey" of course,—I've a feeling that Homer wrote something about moors and fresh air. If ...
— The Girls and I - A Veracious History • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... only been settled by the discovery of a hole in a rock, in which shot had been cast during the siege, and which hole was known to have formerly been in a court. It is no wonder that doubts exist as to the identity of Homer, or the position ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... professionalism, all a device for making expression easy, practised by a great poet because at the moment he had nothing to express. But art is always difficult and cannot be made easy by this means. We need not take a malicious pleasure in such lapses of the great poet; but it is well to know when Homer nods, even though he uses all his craft to pretend that he is wide awake. Criticism may have a negative as well as a positive value. It may set us on our guard against professionalism even in the greatest artists, and most of all in them. ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... homestead, simple, pious, domestic, but they now added foreign ornaments. So also with literature; their own native literature was scanty and practical—laws and rustic proverbs—but they set themselves to produce a new literature, modelled on the Greek. Virgil followed Homer; Plautus copied Menander; and Roman literature took on that secondary and reminiscent character which it never lost. It was a literature of culture, not of creed. This people had so practical a genius that they could put the world in harness; for the decoration of the world ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... Italy and went home. On his way he stayed for some months with the Bishop of Augsburg at Dillingen, on the Danube, and there translated Lucian's De non facile credendis delationibus. A manuscript of Homer sorely tempted him to stay on through the winter. He felt that without Homer his knowledge of Greek was incomplete; and he proposed to copy it out from beginning to end, or at any rate the Iliad. But home called him, and he went ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... signifies hand. This is the case in Thibet, in Siam, and cognate languages, in the Indian Archipelago and in the whole of Oceania, in Africa, and in many of the American peoples and tribes, where it is the origin of the decimal system. In Homer we find the verb [Greek: pempazein], to count in fives, and then for counting in general; in Lapland lokket, and in Finland lukea, to count, is derived from lokke, ten; and the Bambarese adang, to count, is the origin ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... is one of the Heathen Gods; Iupiter's Grandfather. You may read a particular Account of him my dear, in Homer, or Milton, or any of the Greek Poets (pulls out a Bill of the Farce) well I vow its a Whimsicall Bill this; a charming Puff. Lud where's Sir Conjecture? I suppose he can give us a particular Account of it. for he knows ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... sculptured with numerous figures in alto relievo. These figures are sometimes allegorical representations, and sometimes embody the fables of the Greek mythology. Among them are some in the most perfect style of Grecian art, the subjects of which are taken from the poems of Homer; groups representing the besiegers of Troy and its defenders, or Ulysses with his companions and his ships. I gazed with exceeding delight on these works of forgotten artists, who had the verses of Homer by heart—works just drawn from the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... "Poor Uncle Homer!" exclaimed the lieutenant. "He has been very unfortunate. The last time I saw him, I conducted him to my father's place at Bonnydale, after he had been a prisoner on board of the Chateaugay. He was on parole then, and I suppose he and Captain ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... antiquity. In Gen. xli., Joseph has conferred on him the king's ring, an instance more ancient than Prometheus, whom fables call the inventor of the ring. Therefore let those who will hold, with Pliny and his followers, that its use is more recent than Homer. The Greeks seem to have derived the custom of wearing it from the East, and Italy from the Greeks. Juvenal and Persius refer to {417} rings which were worn only on birthdays. Clemens Alexandrinus recommends a limit within which the liberty of engraving upon them should be restrained. ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... brightest stars of the northern hemisphere full four times in lustre, shows these changes of colour so conspicuously that they were regarded as specially characteristic of this star, insomuch that Homer speaks of Sirius (not by name, but as the 'star of autumn') shining most beautifully 'when laved of ocean's wave'—that is, when close to the horizon. And our own poet, Tennyson, following the older ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... of all the best and nicest things in this world. He did what he was told, but in an uninterested sort of way, just as if politics and county business, and work at the estate, were just as much tasks thrust on him as Virgil and Homer had been; and put ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with the ideas developed among the Semitic people of Asia and the Hamitic of Egypt. Undoubtedly, this conquest of the Minoan civilization furnished the origin of many of the tales or folklore that afterward were woven into the Iliad and the Odyssey by {210} Homer. It is not known how early in Greek life these songs originated, but it is a known fact that in the eighth century the Greeks were in possession of their epics, and at this period not only had conquered the Minoan civilization but had absorbed it so ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... and is suggestive of many inquiries, that this abundance was followed, at least in the West, by a famine of more than a thousand years. And it is hard, even after all allowances, to conceive that of all the many manuscripts of Homer which Italy must have possessed we do not know that a single parchment or papyrus was ever read by a single individual, even in a convent, or even by a giant such as Dante, or as Thomas Acquinas, the first of them unquestionably master of all the ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... in question." According to Schneider (who cites the {atimetos metanastes} of Homer, "Il." ix. 648), the reference is not to disabilities in the technical sense, but to humiliating duties, such as the {skaphephoria} imposed on the men, or the {udriaphoria} and {skiadephoria} imposed on their wives and daughters in attendance ...
— On Revenues • Xenophon
... religion. This religion, by many a fanciful skeptic, has been called barren and gloomy; but setting aside all the legends of the Jews, and confining ourselves entirely to the generally received Scriptures, there will be found sufficient food for an imagination warm as that of Homer, Apelles, Phidias, or Praxiteles. It is astonishing that such rich materials for poetry should for so many centuries have been so little regarded, appropriated, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... great and sacred Work of Poesie! Thou freest from Fate, and giv'st Eternity To mortal Wights; but Caesar envy not Their living Names; if Roman Muses ought May promise thee, whilst Homer's honoured, By future Times shalt Thou and I be read; No Age shall us with dark Oblivion stain, But our Pharsalia ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... Mrs. Unwin, unless we should meet her before, and where we will be as happy as the day is long. Order yourself, my cousin, to the Swan at Newport and there you shall find me ready to conduct you to Olney. My dear, I have told Homer what you say about casks and urns, and have asked him whether he is sure that it is a cask in which Jupiter keeps his wine. He swears that it is a cask, and that it will never be anything better than a cask ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... was looking out for new premises, where he might ply his calling, and continue the awful trade of bondage, and his dealings in flesh and blood. Mr. Lowell's heart was steeled against that expedition, and the first series of his Biglow papers, introduced to the world by the Reverend Homer Wilbur, showed how deeply earnest he was, and how terribly rigorous he could be, when the scalpel had to be used. The first knowledge that the reading world had of the curious, ingenuous, and quaint Hosea, was the communication ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... venerable,' of confounding the hero of the romance with the real man. It would be just as proper to identify the hero of the Pickwick Papers with a certain Mr. Pickwick, whom it was, oddly enough, the duty of one of Dickens' sons to call as a witness in an English law-suit not many years ago. Even Homer sometimes nods—at least according to the critics, of whose opinion Lucian credits him with so low an estimation—and the great Bollandists had their historical equanimity—much as experience must have already taught it to bear—so upset by the brilliancy of the fable that they have omitted ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... the man; for, in addition to that, he was both a poet and a painter in thought and feeling, if not in actual fact. He was also a voracious reader of everything that treated of adventure, from the story of the Flood, and Jonah's memorable voyage, to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and everything else of a like character that he could lay hands upon. Altogether, he was a very strange fellow, who evidently thought deeply, and originally, and held many very ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the early settlers in Greece came from the region of Asia Minor, either across the Hellespont or the sea, and populated the Greek islands and the mainland. When this was done has been matter of much conjecture. The early history is lost, but art remains show that in the period before Homer the Greeks were an established race with habits and customs distinctly individual. Egyptian and Asiatic influences are apparent in their art at this early time, but there is, nevertheless, the mark of a race peculiarly apart from all the ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... question remains unanswered: Who wrote Shakspeare? a question, we humbly think, which might be made the theme for as much critical sagacity, pertinacity, and pugnacity, as the almost equally interesting question, who wrote Homer? In the former case, the question is certainly in one respect more simple, for the recognised plays and poems that go by Shakspeare's name are—at least by far the larger portion—unquestionably from one and the same pen; while ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... each night these tableaux were performed and between them were selections of music suitable for the tableaux at the different booths. Spanish booth, Homer ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... man, called The Truth. Why was it called The Truth? How could such an idea arise? Many persons will be weak enough to fancy that, as [Greek: hopoetes] was sometimes an artifice of rhetoric for expressing the exclusive supremacy of Homer, and as by a pure affectation and movement of dissimulation a man was called by the title of The Orator, his own favourite Greek or Roman thus affecting for the moment to know of no other (for all such emphatic and exclusive uses of the imply a momentary annihilation of the competitors, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... first inventors of any art or science, provided they have brought it to perfection, are, in reason, to give laws to it; and, according to their model, all after-undertakers are to build. Thus, in epic poetry, no man ought to dispute the authority of Homer, who gave the first being to that masterpiece of art, and endued it with that form of perfection in all its parts, that nothing was wanting to its excellency. Virgil therefore, and those very few who have succeeded him, endeavoured ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... at play, who are almost incessantly laughing. With young persons past childhood, when they are in high spirits, there is always much meaningless laughter. The laughter of the gods is described by Homer as "the exuberance of their celestial joy after their daily banquet." A man smiles—and smiling, as we shall see, graduates into laughter— at meeting an old friend in the street, as he does at any trifling pleasure, such as smelling a sweet perfume.[1] Laura Bridgman, from her blindness ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... soul into any mood at all peculiar; the second, what that mood is. It matters to me little by whom our Ossian was composed, and it matters nothing whoever may in his ignorance declare that there never was an Ossian any more than a Homer: here is a something that has power over my heart and soul, works upon them as not anything else does. I do not ask whether its power be great or small; it is enough that it is a peculiar power, one by itself; that it puts my spiritual consciousness in a certain individual condition, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... novel till I got 'Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall' out of the library at Curlew. I thought it was the loveliest thing in the world! Next I read 'Barriers Burned Away' and then Pope's translation of Homer. Some combination, all right! When I went to Minneapolis, just two years ago, I guess I'd read pretty much everything in that Curlew library, but I'd never heard of Rossetti or John Sargent or Balzac or Brahms. But——Yump, I'll study. Look here! Shall I get out of this tailoring, this ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... incendio. Pereant amici dum una inimici intercidant.] But in gentle Dispositions, there is a certain inbred Love of their Country, which they can no more divest themselves of, than of Humanity it self. Such a Love as Homer describes in Ulysses, who preferred Ithaca, tho' no better than a Bird's Nest fix'd to a craggy Rock in the Sea, to all the Delights of the Kingdom which ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... In every essay that follows, there are the same great odds and the same electric call to the youth to face them. It is, indeed, as much a world of fable and romance that Emerson introduces us to as we get in Homer or Herodotus. It is true, all true,—true as Arthur and his knights, or Pilgrim's Progress, and I pity the man who has not tasted its intoxication, or who can see nothing ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... shaking hands across them, Elizabeth quietly leaned over into the stern of the fishing-boat and took up one or two books which lay there. The first proved to be an ill- bound, ill printed, Greek and Latin dictionary; the other was a Homer! Elizabeth laid them down again greatly amazed, and wondering what kind of people ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... captor (often a god, a giant, a witch, a fiend), but here—a Turk. The youth is loved and released (commonly through magic spells) by the daughter of the gaoler, god, giant, witch, Turk, or what not. In Greece, Jason is the Lord Bateman, Medea is the Sophia, of the tale, which was known to Homer and Hesiod, and was fully narrated by Pindar. THE OTHER YOUNG PERSON, the second bride, however, comes in differently, in the Greek. In far-off Samoa, a god is the captor.* The gaoler is a magician ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... soldiers of the Emperor. But your kinsman, the sea-king Arinbiorn, who was lying there at anchor, tried to pacify him. To this Jarl Eric would not listen; so the sea-king said next that he would never suffer Chios to be laid waste, because it was an island where the lays of an old Greek bard, called Homer, were excellently sung, and where more-over a very choice wine was made. Words proving of no avail, a combat ensued; in which Arinbiorn had so much the advantage that Jarl Eric lost two of his ships, and only with difficulty escaped in one which had already sustained great damage. Eric ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... 1915. Imbros. After lunch felt so sick of scribble, scribble, scribble whilst adventure sat seductive upon my doorstep that I fluttered forth. At 2 o'clock boarded H.M.S. Savage (Lieutenant-Commander Homer) and, with Aspinall and Freddie, steered for Gully Beach. We didn't cast anchor but got into a cockleshell of a small dinghy and rowed ashore under the cliffs, where we were met by de Lisle. Along the beach men were either bathing or basking mother-naked on the hot sand—enjoying themselves thoroughly. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... answers characteristically, (1) 'Quietness.' 'But Temperance is a fine and noble thing; and quietness in many or most cases is not so fine a thing as quickness.' He tries again and says (2) that temperance is modesty. But this again is set aside by a sophistical application of Homer: for temperance is good as well as noble, and Homer has declared that 'modesty is not good for a needy man.' (3) Once more Charmides makes the attempt. This time he gives a definition which he has heard, and of which Socrates conjectures ...
— Charmides • Plato
... occupation, a little door, I never should have suspected, flew open, and out popped Monsieur de V., from a place where nothing, I believe, but broomsticks and certain other utensils were ever before deposited. This gentleman, the most active investigator of Homer since the days of the good bishop of Thessalonica, bespatters you with more learning in a minute than others communicate in half a year; quotes Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, etc., with a formidable fluency; ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Popular Tales, i. 398, &c.: the most famous are those of Polycrates, of Solomon, and the Sanskrit drama of "Sakuntala," the plot of which turns upon such a ring. "Letters to kill bearer" have been traced from Homer downwards by Prof. Koehler on Gonzenbach, ii. 220, and "the substituted letter" by the same authority in Occ. u. Or., ii. 289. Mr. Baring-Gould, who was one of the pioneers of the study of folk-tales ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... of stepson with his stepmother, hanging is awarded to the man. In the same case Swanwhite, the woman, is punished, by treading to death with horses. A woman accomplice in adultery is treated to what Homer calls a "stone coat." Incestuous adultery is ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... helped to deliver the stone and his five brothers and sisters from their paternal prison? What shall we think if we read in the most admired of classic poets that these escaped prisoners became afterwards the great gods of Greece, gods believed in by Homer, worshipped by Sokrates, immortalized by Pheidias? Why should we listen to such horrors as that Tantalos killed his own son, boiled him, and placed him before the gods to eat? or that the gods collected his limbs, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... present state of the Troad, which appears, from physical facts, to justify the mythical description of Homer,—see Heyne and Kennedy. Compare Virg. AEn. ii. 610, sqq.; Tryphiodor. 566, sqq. and ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... members of guilds,[125] in medicin[126] innkeeping,[127] in vaudevil[128]; there were even female barbers[129] and charioteer[130]. Examples of women who toiled for a living with their own hands are indeed very old, as the widow, described by Homer, who worked for a scanty wage to support her fatherless children, or the wreathmaker, mentioned by Aristophanes.[131] But such was the case only with women of the lower classes; the lady of high birth acted through ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... the slaughter with equal cruelty by burning the English alive in their sleep in the very buildings where the murder took place, the Barns of Ayr, as they were called. The history is unauthenticated, but it is believed in the neighborhood of Ayr, and has been handed down by Wallace's Homer, Blind Harry, whose poem on the exploits of the Knight of Ellerslie was published sixty years ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... improve in his scholarship, and during the last six months before leaving to enter Williams College, in 1868, Mr. Tufts says he did seem "to catch something of the spirit of Cicero and Virgil and Homer [where was Horace?], and to catch a little ambition for an education." His gentle preceptor thus summed up the characteristics of the youth he was trying to ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... them among the greatest living, men who know, and can feel, the spirit, as well as the letter, of the old Classics. Do they remember to-day what the relation of the Goddess of Wisdom was to the God of War, in Homer, when, to use the Latin names which are perhaps more familiar, to the general reader than the Greek, Mars "indulged in lawless rage," and Jove sent Juno and Minerva ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... on either side of him. Many of these country places I came to know afterwards from the talk of the men, and many others I have travelled through, so that the names upon the banners have come to have a real meaning with me. Homer hath, I remember, a chapter or book wherein he records the names of all the Grecian chiefs and whence they came, and how many men they brought to the common muster. It is pity that there is not some Western Homer who could record the names of these brave peasants ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Went James Russell Lowell The First Snow-fall James Russell Lowell "We Are Seven" William Wordsworth My Child John Pierpont The Child's Wish Granted George Parsons Lathrop Challenge Kenton Foster Murray Tired Mothers May Riley Smith My Daughter Louise Homer Greene "I Am Lonely" George Eliot Sonnets from "Mimma Bella" Eugene Lee-Hamilton Rose-Marie ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... but one particular personality, and which a Saint-Simon, a Balzac, or a Shakespeare himself could not render if the rich language they used, and which was enhanced by their temerities, did not contribute its subtleties to the multiplied details of their observation.[3224] Neither the Bible, nor Homer, nor Dante, nor Shakespeare[3225] could be translated with this style. Read Hamlet's monologue in Voltaire and see what remains of it, an abstract piece of declamation, with about as much of the original in it as there is of Othello in his Orosmane. Look at Homer and then at ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... before Christ—the renowned city of Sidon being their great sea-port, whence their ships put forth to trade with Cyprus and Rhodes, Greece, Sardinia, Sicily, Gaul, and Spain. Little is known of the state of trade in those days, or of the form or size of ancient vessels. Homer tells us, in his account of the Trojan War, that the Phoenicians supplied the combatants with many articles of luxury; and from Scripture we learn that the same enterprising navigators brought gold to Solomon from Ophir in the year ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... several towns that have laid claim to being his birthplace. M. Jean Reynaud, the distinguished French philosophical writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, once said that Basil Valentine, like Ossian and Homer, had many towns claim him years after his death. He also suggested that, like those old poets, it was possible that the writings sometimes attributed to Basil Valentine were really the work not of one man, but of several individuals. ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... been found associated with extinct animals and prehistoric remains. It is, therefore a strange fact that the fowl is not mentioned in the Old Testament, nor figured on the ancient Egyptian monuments. It is not referred to by Homer or Hesiod (about 900 B.C.); but is mentioned by Theognis and Aristophanes between 400 and 500 B.C. It is figured on some of the Babylonian cylinders, between the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., of which Mr. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... take another passage from Homer to illustrate the same point. It is the place where Achilles is endeavouring to light the funeral pyre of Patroclus, but because there is no wind the fire will not catch. What is he to do? What can he do? Nothing, say we, but wait till the wind comes. But to the Greek the winds are ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Ambrose would gladly have given up taking pupils. He was growing old and his sight was beginning to trouble him; he was very weary of Thucydides, of Homer, of the works of Mr. Todhunter of which the green bindings expressed a hope still unrealised, of conic sections—even of his beloved Horace. He was tired of the stupidities of the dull young men who were sent to him because they could not "keep up", and he had long ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... observed, is the most attractive in the closet. It comprehends a very full survey of the far-famed island which the hero of the 'Odyssey' has immortalized; for we really are inclined to think that the author has established the identity of the modern 'Theaki' with the 'Ithaca' of Homer. At all events, if it be an illusion, it is a very agreeable deception, and is effected by an ingenious interpretation of the passages in Homer that are supposed to be descriptive of the scenes which our traveller has visited. We shall extract ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... execution, mixed with short speeches from the principal warriors, conceived with much force, variety, and character; the death of the hero is also very graphically described. The whole approximates much more nearly than could have been expected to the war-scenes of Homer." ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... this, however, there was a repulsion to using; and both the Greeks and Romans were wont to slip clear of the employment of their [Greek: thanatos], mors, etc., by such circumlocutions as vitam suam mutare, transire e seculo; [Greek: koimesato chalkeon hypnon]—he slept the brazen sleep (Homer's Iliad, [Greek: Lamda], 241); [Greek: ton de skotos oss' ekalypsen]—and darkness covered his eyes (Iliad, [Greek: Zeta], 11); or he completeth the destiny of life, etc. This reminds us of the French aversion to uttering their mort. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... student says, "I will; therefore I can." He also says, "I can; therefore I will." He knows that the forces fighting for him are more than those that fight against him, strong as these are. Man in his noblest relationships, the songs of the poet (the best interpreter, from Homer and Virgil to the "Winepress" of Alfred Noyes), the torture, the pains, the sufferings, the woes, the vision of the prophet of a loving and perfect humanity, the reason of logic—all these and more are to him inspirations, and strengthen him in his great ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... things, and can preach such doctrines without pity and sorrow, know not of what they rob a mankind already but too miserable by its own folly and its own sin—a mankind which if it have not hope in God and in Christ, is truly, as Homer said of old, more miserable than the ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... Often and often, after the daily dreadful lines, the bread and butter winning lines on some contemporary folly or frivolity, does a man take up some piece of work hopelessly unremunerative, foredoomed to failure as far as money or fame go, some dealing with the classics of the world, Homer or Aristotle, Lucian or Moliere. It is like a bath after a day's toil, it is tonic and clean; and such studies, if not necessary to success, are, at least, conducive to mental health and ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... estate about six miles down the left bank of the Rhone from Geneva, appertaining to St. Victor. "It was a chastel of pleasaunce, not a forteresse," says our hero, who is the Homer of his own brave deeds. But the duke kept a garrison there, and to every demand the prior made for his place he replied that he did not dare give it up for fear of being excommunicated by the pope. Rent-time came, and the Savoyard government ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... other words proclaim by sound of trumpet that he gave a dinner. This was of necessity. Hence, when Agamemnon offers a hecatomb to Jupiter, his brother Menelaus walks in to dinner, [Greek: hachletost], without invitation. As a brother, we are told by Homer that no invitation was required. He had the privilege of what in German is beautifully called 'ein Kind des Hauses,' a child of the house. This dispensation from the necessity of a formal invitation Homer explains, but as to explanation ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... and raised his hand. It was cold and heavy. His lips were blue, and his closed eyelids looked as though, in the words of Homer, "Death's purple finger" had shut them fast forever. No breath—no pulsation of the heart. I looked fearfully at Zara. ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... business and knowledge of the age. Tribonian composed, both in prose and verse, on a strange diversity of curious and abstruse subjects; a double panegyric of Justinian and the life of the philosopher Theodotus; the nature of happiness and the duties of government; Homer's catalogue and the four-and-twenty sorts of metre; the astronomical canon of Ptolemy; the changes of the months; the houses of the planets; and the harmonic system of the world. To the literature of Greece he added the use of the Latin ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... father's chambers, was admitted a writer to the signet in 1835, and five years later was called to the Scottish bar. But, by his own confession, though he "followed the law, he never could overtake it." His first publication—a volume entitled Poland, Homer, and other Poems, in which he gave expression to his eager interest in the state of Poland—had appeared in 1832. While in Germany he made a translation in blank verse of the first part of Faust; but, forestalled by other translations, it was never published. In 1836 he made his earliest contributions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... old mountain carriage road, is the place said to be the dreamland of Rip Van Winkle—the greatest character of American mythology, more real than the heroes of Homer or the massive gods of Olympus. The railway, however, has rather dispensed with Rip Van Winkle's resting-place. The old stage drivers had so long pointed out the identical spot where he slept that they had come to believe in it, but his ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... the control of the metropolitan authority. He went so far as to interfere with the Archbishopric of York, and with the help of the king attempted to divide it into three sees. He was, moreover, an enthusiastic scholar, and first diffused the study of Greek in England. He had brought a copy of Homer with him, and is said to have established a school of Greek in Canterbury. He died in 690, and after his death there was no archbishop for three years. In 693, one Brethwald, an English monk, some time Abbot of Reculver, was appointed to the see. ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... by antiquaries to be the Capiterides; and the Abbe de Fontenu, in the Memoires de Literature, tom. vii. p. 126, proves, according to Vallancey, that the Phoenicians traded here for tin before the Trojan war. Homer frequently mentions this metal; and even in Scripture we have allusions to this land under the name of Tarshish (Ezekiel, c. xxvii., v. 12-25), being the place whence the Tyrians procured various metals, and among ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... still, it is not unwelcome, for the honour of human nature, to discover in consequence of them those vestiges of moral rectitude which the degradation of ages had not obliterated from the Tartar character. It is well known that when Homer, 1,500 years before, speaks of these barbarians, he calls them, on the one hand, "drinkers of mare's milk;" on the other, "the most just of men." Truth, honesty, justice, hospitality, according to their view of things, are the historical characteristics, it must be granted, of Scythians, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... alphabet in half an hour," said Ridley, "and you'd read Homer in a month. I should think it ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... of Homer's tales were all of noble birth—they were goddesses, princesses, hereditary gentlewomen. In early historic times, also, it was only royal or gentle blood that secured for woman political power. Athena was, in gentle ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... ripest scholar, but my predecessor at the school-house had a way of sneering at him that was as good as sarcasm. When they were on their legs at the same time, asking each other passionately to be calm, and rolling out lines from Homer, that made the inn-keeper look fearfully to the fastenings of the door, their heads very nearly came together although the table was between them. The old dominie had an advantage in being the shorter man, for he could hammer on the table as ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... in book form. Not only was Lowell's name not yet connected publicly with the Yankee humor, but the poems were provided with an elaborate introduction, notes and comments, by the learned pastor of the church at Jaalam, Homer Wilbur. His notes and introduction are filled with Latin quotations, and he appears as much a scholar as Hosea Biglow does a natural. He says he tried to teach Hosea better English, but decided to let him work out his own ideas in his own way. Still, he endorses Hosea's principles, ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... Europe, no dinner and no drawing-room would be perfect without his talk. He would have been heard gladly at Johnson's club. The Hortensins of our courts, with a cloud of clients, he yet finds time to be a scholar and a critic, and to read Plato and Homer as they were read by Plato's and Homer's countrymen. Unsurpassed in that eloquence which, if it does not convince, intoxicates a jury, he was counted, so long as Webster lived, the second advocate of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... situated on the coast of Asia Minor, not far from the entrance to what is now the Sea of Mar'mo-ra. It was besieged for ten years by a vast army of the Greeks (natives of Greece or Hel'las) under one of their kings called Ag-a-mem'non. Homer, the greatest of the ancient poets, tells about this siege in his famous poem, the Il'i-ad. We shall see later on how the siege was brought to an end by the capture and destruction of the city, as well as how ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... wholly satisfactory. Who began it among the Romans? becomes the next interesting question. One old writer says it was brought to Rome from Arcadia sixty years before the Trojan war (which Homer wrote about, you know). I'm sure that's far enough back to satisfy anybody. The same writer also says that the Pope tried to abolish it in the fifth century, but he succeeded only in sending it down to us in the name of St. Valentine ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... not Achilles and many another hero beautiful as brave? Does not Homer call them so many ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... taste when I confess that Bloomfield's memory is dear to me; that only because of this feeling for the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and by other names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one of ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... were a nation of dwarfs, so called from a Greek word which means the cubit or measure of about thirteen inches, which was said to be the height of these people. They lived near the sources of the Nile, or according to others, in India. Homer tells us that the cranes used to migrate every winter to the Pygmies' country, and their appearance was the signal of bloody warfare to the puny inhabitants, who had to take up arms to defend their cornfields against ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... The true war poets, after all, have been warriors themselves. Koerner and Alcaeus fought as well as sang, and sang because they fought. Old Homer, too,—who can believe that he had not hewn his way through the very battles which he describes, and seen every wound, every shape of agony? A noble thought, to go out with that army against the northern Anarch, singing in ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... describes nothings. Now Milton, the old Puritan—the cold-water man—he had fancies which he was able to transmit, and which are worthy to be forever treasured. The early Greeks were exceedingly temperate, and the men who composed the 'Nostoi' were not drunkards—Homer sang the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' with a sober tongue, and a sober brain back of his utterances. The man who gets drunk to write poetry, will find it easier to write his poetry on the following morning, spite of headache, blue-devils, and all." He ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... the Great, the Macedonian (whom Daniel calls either the brass, or the leopard, or the he-goat), on coming to the tomb of Achilles, "Happy art thou, youth," he said, "who hast been blest with a great herald of thy worth"—meaning Homer. But I have to tell the conversation and life of such and so great a man, that even Homer, were he here, would either envy my matter, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley |
