"Iliad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was often in his hands, and the dramatists formed his almost inseparable companions. How deeply he felt the art of the Homeric poems, may be gathered from the following extract:—"I congratulate you on your conquest of the Iliad. You must have been astonished at the perpetually increasing magnificence of the last seven books. Homer there truly begins to be himself. The battle of the Scamander, the funeral of Patroclus, and the high and solemn close of the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... diomatic and national phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... by what devious ways the mind of the artist had traveled in reaching this type and example of behavior. She wonders whether the artistic impulse was born in him or whether it was acquired. She sees that he knew his Homer and she would be glad to know just how his reading of the "Iliad" had come to function in this particular picture. She further wonders what lessons in drawing and painting the artist had had in the schools that finally culminated in this masterpiece, and whether any of his classmates ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... which modern life loses its direct and intensest joys, a craving for a world untroubled by the problems that weigh on us, express themselves as vividly in poems like the 'Earthly Paradise' as in the return to the Iliad. The charm of Vergil on the other hand lies in the strange fidelity with which across so many ages he echoes those complex thoughts which make the life of our own. Vergil is the Tennyson of the older world; his power, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... grating English, whose Teutonic jar Shakes the racked axle of Art's rattling car, Fits like mosaic in the lines that gird Fast in its place each many-angled word; From Saxon lips Anacreon's numbers glide, As once they melted on the Teian tide, And, fresh transfused, the Iliad thrills again From Albion's cliffs as o'er Achaia's plain The proud heroic, with, its pulse-like beat, Rings like the cymbals clashing as they meet; The sweet Spenserian, gathering as it flows, Sweeps gently onward to its dying close, Where waves ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation, so he too first laid down the main lines of Comedy, by dramatising the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire. His Margites bears the same relation to Comedy that the Iliad and Odyssey do to Tragedy. But when Tragedy and Comedy came to light, the two classes of poets still followed their natural bent: the lampooners became writers of Comedy, and the Epic poets were succeeded by Tragedians, since the drama was a larger ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... unworthily associated with almost every department of literature the name of a single English writer, it is CHAPTER THE LAST. Had the author lived to finish it, he would doubtless have added to his Iliad of the Siege of Paris its most epic episode, by here describing the mighty combat between those two princes of the Parisian Bourse, the magnanimous Duplessis and the redoubtable Louvier. Amongst the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gained by studying the Iliad as a congeries of fragments once independent of each other: no portion of the poem can be shown to have ever been so, and the supposition introduces difficulties greater than those which it removes. But it is not necessary to affirm that the whole poem, as we now read it, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... under the editorial care of Dr Mackay, formerly of Dunoon. The chief amusement of Maclachlan's leisure hours was executing translations of Homer into Gaelic. His translation of the third book of the Iliad has been printed. Of his powers as a Gaelic poet, an estimate may be formed from the following ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... any agitations of the heart or the mind, I would have placidly written simple legends which I would have been credulous enough to believe; I would have unraveled with intense curiosity some unknown manuscripts, and discovered with tears of joy the Iliad or the AEneid; I would have sketched imaginary cathedrals; I would have heated alembics—and perhaps have invented gunpowder; which is by no means the best thing I ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... things, however, and one was to read from the books on the shelf. There were several books on astronomy; Pilgrim's Progress; the Bible; a volume of Shakespeare; a history of England; a translation of the "Iliad", and some volumes of poetry:—Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Where her father had got these books and the silver and the blue china, she knew no more than he. He had tried and tried to remember, but he had forgotten. He had no identity, ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... say that clouds never were stationary. Those foolish letters were so far useful in causing a friend to write me the pretty one I am about to read to you, quoting a passage about clouds in Homer which I had myself never noticed, though perhaps the most beautiful of its kind in the Iliad. In the fifth book, after the truce is broken, and the aggressor Trojans are rushing to the onset in a tumult of clamor and charge, Homer says that the Greeks, abiding them "stood like clouds." My correspondent, giving the passage, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... towers were oracular temples; and Hesychius expressly says, [Greek: Aphetoreia, manteia. Aphetoros, propheteuontos]. Hesychius. [Greek: Aphetoros Apollonos]. Iliad. l. [Alpha]. v. 404. [Greek: Propheteuontos kai ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... turn inflict upon the reader, if I were only certain that he is one of those dreadful parents who, under the aegis of friendship, bore you at a streets corner with that remarkable thing which Freddy said the other day, and insist on singing to you, at an evening parly, the Iliad of Tommy's woes. ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... silver-tongued old man; and left behind them valiant sons, but not so great as they had been. Yet their fame, too, lives till this day, for they fought at the ten years' siege of Troy: and their story is in the book which we call Homer, in two of the noblest songs on earth—the 'Iliad,' which tells us of the siege of Troy, and Achilles' quarrel with the kings; and the 'Odyssey,' which tells the wanderings of Odysseus, through many lands for many years, and how Alcinous sent him home at ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... I hope, a Thomas Hughes will come who will write the story, which can be made as healthful as "Tom Brown," though it will have a different flavor. What a chance for character study! What opportunity for an Iliad of many a gallant struggle! Valuable only in a lesser degree than what is learned from books is what is learned from men in college, that is, from young men, and herein lies the greater merit of the greater place. In the little ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... there must have been, for those who confronted them for the first time, excitement and surprise, the sudden, unforeseen satisfaction of the desire of beauty. Yet the Odyssey, with its marvellous adventure, is more romantic than the Iliad, which nevertheless contains, among many other romantic episodes, that of the immortal horses of Achilles, who weep at the death of Patroclus. Aeschylus is more romantic than Sophocles, whose Philoctetes, were it written now, might figure, for the strangeness of its motive and the perfectness of ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... each new pain; how much nerve treasure it takes to conquer each temptation or endure each self-sacrifice. Too often society forgets that the song, law or reform has cost the health and life of the giver. Tradition says that, through much study, the Iliad cost Homer his eyes. There is strange meaning in the fact that Dante's face was plowed deep with study and suffering and written all over with the ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... time occur to me, I may as well conclude the matter here. In a letter of Pope's, addressed to the Duke of Buckingham, there is an account of Stanton Harcourt, (as I now find, although the name is not mentioned,) where he resided while translating a part of the "Iliad." It is one of the most admirable pieces of description in the language,—playful and picturesque, with fine touches of humorous pathos,—and conveys as perfect a picture as ever was drawn of a decayed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... bard singing through the villages of Greece met a rude and simple folk. But Homer opened up a gallery in the clouds, and there unveiled Achilles as the ideal Greek. It became the ambition of every Athenian boy to fix the Iliad in his mind and repeat Achilles in his heart and life. Soon the Achilles in the sky looked down upon 20,000 young Achilles walking through the streets beneath. With what admiration do men recall the intellectual achievements ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... walks on with his tormentor, "his ears dropped like those of an overladen ass." At last one of the bore's creditors comes up, collars him with threats, hales him to the law courts, while the relieved poet quotes in his joy from the rescue of Hector in the Iliad, "Thus Apollo bore me from the fray." In this Satire, which was admirably imitated by Swift, it always seems to me that we get Horace at his very best, his dry quaintness and his inoffensive fun. The delicacy of Roman satire died with him; to reappear in our ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... engaged in an animated discussion with Hammond on the relative attractions of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey;" her opinion differed from his, and she was well able to hold her ground. Her face was now both eloquent and attractive, her eyes were bright, her words terse and epigrammatic. She looked so different a girl from the cowed and miserable little Prissie of ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... the Iliad describe or narrate? The downfall of Troy, which was the most memorable event in the early history ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... wit which I have met with is very venerable for its antiquity, and has produced several pieces which have lived very near as long as the "Iliad" itself: I mean, those short poems printed among the minor Greek poets, which resemble the figure of an egg, a pair of wings, an axe, a ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... The airboat crossed a fair-sized river. "That's the Styx," Alexander said. "Grandfather named it. He was a classicist in his way—spent a lot of his time reading books most people never heard of. Things like the Iliad and Gone with the Wind. The mountains he called the Apennines, and that volcano's Mount Olympus. The marshland to the north is called the Pontine Marshes—our main road is the Camino Real." Alexander grinned. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... Tory journalist and pamphleteer, who published various works, including a translation of the Iliad. He died in a ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... moment with his self-pitying voice in her ears, reciting his Iliad of reflected troubles, her mind found a whimsical parallel for his self-absorption. He was like some unheroic wanderer in desert places who had stumbled upon another equally unfortunate, but more stalwart ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... so brutally abused translation of Homer. "Dr. Clarke, whose critical exactness is well known, has not been able to point out above three or four mistakes in the sense through the whole Iliad. The real faults of the translation are of a different kind." So says Warton, himself a scholar. It appears by this, then, that he avoided the chief fault of a translator. As to its other faults, they consist in his having made a beautiful English poem ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... duly flogged into every Attic schoolboy.[*] But the great text-book dwarfing all others, is Homer,—"the Bible of the Greeks," as later ages will call it. Even in the small school we visit, several of the pupils can repeat five or six long episodes from both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," and there is one older boy present (an extraordinary, but by no means an unprecedented case) who can repeat BOTH of the long epics word for word.[] Clearly the absence of many books has then its compensations. The average Athenian lad has what seems ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... greatest work does not stand at the end of a long period of development, but the first and oldest is the greatest. Nothing has ever been produced to equal the Iliad and Odyssey, written 900 B. C. We have epics that will always hold a prominent place in literature, Virgil's Aeneid, Milton's Paradise Lost, but neither these nor the many flights attempted into epic poetry before or since will be ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... literature, but the world looks up, and behold, there is the star shining just as before. Many scholars and many poets have scoffed at his translations of {198} Homer, but generations of English school-boys have learned to love the "Iliad" because of the way in which Pope has told them the story; and as to the telling of a story, the judgment of a school-boy sometimes counts for more than the judgment of a sage. Pope's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... might have said that the reader comes to your translation, but to see what they really said. When Cesarotti undertook to show how Homer would have written in the eighteenth century, he recast the Iliad and called it "The Death of Hector," and in this he dealt more honestly with his readers than Pope; for, although he failed to make a good poem, he did not attempt to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, the master casts behind him. How sinks the song in the waves of melody which the universe pours over his soul! Before that ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... conceptions in one beautiful unity. You can never have expected that your life would suffice to attain such an end, but to have struck out such a path is worth more than reaching the end of any other; and you, like Achilles in the Iliad, made your choice between Phthia and immortality. Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and had you from infancy been placed in the midst of choice natural surroundings and of an idealizing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... most admirable type. It was a long, and doubtless melancholy tale; so much so, that the kind guardians of the place had scratched it with their knives to prevent its being easily deciphered. In fact, that little cell had evidently contained an Iliad of romances; and if the walls could have spoken, or even the scrawls been deciphered, some strange tales, and perhaps many mysterious events, would have come to light. Dumiger gazed on these sad records of prior ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... a strange transfiguration that is being wrought. Experiences which were painful or grievous to the actors and sufferers become in the representation the source of keen pleasure to the hearers or readers. The Iliad is mainly a story of men destroying one another. The Odyssey depicts a long strife with hardship and danger. The men who heard those songs were themselves familiar with the fight, with the wounds and terrors mixed with its energies and elations; they had tasted ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... of the Shah Nameh, the Persian Iliad—Sadi, and Hafiz, the immortal Hafiz, the oriental Anacreon. The last is reverenced beyond any bard of ancient or modern times by the Persians, who resort to his tomb near Shiraz, to celebrate his memory. A splendid copy of his works is chained ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... upon mythology as an ancient form of religion, such freedom of language as is here used by Xenophanes and Plato, must seem startling. If the Iliad were really the Bible of the Greeks, as it has not infrequently been called, such violent invectives would have been impossible. For let us bear in mind that Xenophanes, though he boldly denied the existence of all the mythological deities, and declared his belief in One God, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... initial, bind a book, give advice to printers, lecture to teachers, give lessons on rhetoric and oratory, or entertain the ladies with recitations from the Iliad ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... books to those I am most intimately acquainted with:—my Elzevir Horace to T. Randolph—he will find translations of the best odes upon the fly leaves, much better than any he could make; my Greek books, the Iliad, Graeca Minora, Herodotus, etc., which are almost entirely free from dog-ears and thumb-marks, as I have never opened them, I give to L. Burwell, requesting that he will thenceforth apply himself to Greek in earnest. My Hebrew books I give to Fairfax, the ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... all of the same kind, and equally, if not more, trifling than your's. A catalogue of them would look like a Bible genealogy, and were I to undertake the task of giving it, I should be obliged to invoke the muse, as Homer does before he begins the catalogue of the ships in his second Iliad. How long the currency of such compositions may continue, how many may be annually poured forth from the press, is more than any man can say, without being endued with the spirit of prophesy. But, without making any such pretensions, I can foretel, that ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... begins in the Hellenic mythology with Apollo, the god of light and the promoter of health. In the "Iliad" he is hailed as the disperser of epidemics, and, in this respect, the ancients were well informed in attributing destruction of infection to the sun's rays. Chiron, the Centaur, it was believed, was taught ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Sign of the War-Way.]—i.e. an ominous sign seen by the army as it started on its journey. In Homer, Iliad, ll. 305-329, it is a snake which eats the nine young of a mother bird and then the mother, and is turned into stone afterwards.—All through this chorus the language of the prophet Calchas is intentionally obscure ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... goddesses of our ancestors the chief concern of the prologue and succeeding dramas. Except for those who prefer to see only ethical symbols in the characters there is some force in the objection. Like Homer in his "Iliad," Wagner has a celestial as well as a terrestrial plot in his "Ring of the Nibelung," and the men and women, or semi-divine creatures, in it are but the unconscious agents of the good and evil powers typified ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... life," said Elihu Burritt, "was when I had first gained the full meaning of the first fifteen lines of Homer's Iliad." Elihu Burritt's father died when he was sixteen, and Elihu was apprenticed to a blacksmith in his native village of New Britain, Conn. He had to work at the forge for ten or twelve hours a day; but while blowing the bellows, he would solve mentally difficult ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the enterprising bachelor would often go back to Kentucky, and pass through as many adventures in bringing his wife home as a returning crusader would meet between Beirut and Vienna. If she was a young woman who respected herself, the household gear she would insist on bringing would entail an Iliad of embarrassments. An old farmer of Sangamon County still talks of a featherbed weighing fifty-four pounds with which his wife made him swim six ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... order Pentaur rewrote the song he had sung at Pelusium; it is preserved in three temples, and, in fragments, on several papyrus-rolls which can be made to complete each other. It was destined to become the national epic—the Iliad of Egypt. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the fates had decreed to be done. Their fates determined what kingdoms should rise, and what should fall; what heroes should conquer, and what should be conquered. This doctrine runs throughout the poem of Homer called the Iliad; so that he makes the fates determine the ends of his two chief heroes, Hector and Achilles. And though the former was knocked down several times in the different engagements and dangerously wounded, yet as the fates had decreed that he should fall by the hand of Achilles, he is rescued from ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... before the servants got up. By six o'clock the street was alive and busy with friendly salutations. The milkman seemed a late comer, a poor, sluggish fellow who failed to appreciate the early hours of the day. A man, we found, might live through quite a little Iliad of adventure before going to his ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... poppy, but notice, in connection with this idea, how it droops its head before blooming; an action which, I doubt not, mingled in Homer's thought with the image of its depression when filled by rain, in the passage of the Iliad, which, as I have relieved your memory of three unnecessary names of poppy families, you have memory ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... daughter." (Plato's "Dialogues," Cratylus, p. 402.) The ancients always alluded to the ocean as a river encircling the earth, as in the map of Cosmos (see page 95 ante); probably a reminiscence of the great canal described by Plato which surrounded the plain of Atlantis. Homer (Iliad, book xviii.) describes Tethys, "the mother goddess," coming to Achilles "from the deep ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... No, with rapture. You must go mad—weep, rend your clothes, and roll Over and over, like the ancient Greeks, When listening to Iliad. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... produced the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", needs no description here: but it is very important to observe the effect of these poems on the course of post-Homeric epic. As the supreme perfection and universality of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... using Jowett's version of it. So it is with Taine's "English Literature" and Von Hoist's history of American politics. On the other hand it may be said that no translation of the "Odes" of Horace has any value at all; and a faithful study of one book of the "Iliad" is worth all the translations from Homer that have ever been made. But the subject is an ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... The Iliad has all the traits that have been mentioned, but society is still loose enough in its bonds to give the characters free play; it is, in the main, a hero-epic. The Aeneid, on the contrary, exhibits the enormous development of the social idea; ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... translate and be examined critically on Anacreon, two or three of Lucian's dialogues, extracts from Epictetus, Bion, and Moschus, and perhaps a book or two of Homer." "But," declares one of his former fellow-students, "Lockhart professed the whole Iliad and Odyssey and I know not how much besides." His brilliant success on this occasion led to his being offered one of the Snell Exhibitions to Oxford,—an offer which was accepted after some hesitation on account of his youth. He was not yet fifteen, and still wore the round jacket ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Why did they fight, why did Diomed the divine break over the head of Meriones that great brazen helmet of ten points? why did Achilles and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their lances? Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter. With Cosette's garter, Homer would construct the Iliad. He would put in his poem, a loquacious old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor. My friends, in bygone days, in those amiable days of yore, people married wisely; they had a good contract, and then they had a good carouse. As soon as Cujas had taken ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... de Troie.] The "Roman de Troie" was quite as popular in mediaeval Europe as the "Iliad" had been in Hellenic countries during the palmy days of Greece, and was translated into every dialect. There are still extant many versions of the romance in every European tongue, for it penetrated even into the frozen regions of Scandinavia and Iceland. ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... bereft of all political rights. In such a case, a jury is indeed entitled to speak, before all, the language of the people, the language of its aspirations towards freedom, which must be heard before everything else, if the nation is to acquire its true rights. Even as, in the Iliad, the orphaned Andromache says to the parting Hector: 'Thou art now father, brother, and dear mother to me!' so the Russian people may say to its jury: 'You are now legislators, judges, and the source of mercy at one and the same time to me! ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Peruvians. Long poems, extending to three and four hundred lines, were retained by memory, and transmitted from generation to generation among the Sandwich Islanders. Many scholars have believed that all the early literature of Greece, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, and all other "poems of the Cycle," was preserved in this way by the Rhapsodists for centuries, down to the time of Peisistratus, and then for the first time reduced to writing. This shows at least what they ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... of verse on the top shelf of the bookcase, of which I used to look at the outside without penetrating deeply within, were Pope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dryden's Virgil, pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James Crissy in Philadelphia, and illustrated with small copper-plates, which somehow seemed to put the matter hopelessly beyond me. It was as if they said to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the rules which convention assigns to viatic narrative. It traverses the most affecting regions of the world, and describes no one of them: the Troad—and we get only his childish raptures over Pope's "Homer's Iliad"; Stamboul—and he recounts the murderous services rendered by the Golden Horn to the Assassin whose serail, palace, council chamber, it washes; Cairo— but the Plague shuts out all other thoughts; Jerusalem—but ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... grew deeper between his eyebrows. He remembered suddenly that his earliest ambition—the ambition of his childhood—had been that of a gentlemanly scholar of the old order. He had meant to sit in a library and read Horace, or to complete the laborious translation of the "Iliad" which his father had left unfinished. Then his studies had ended abruptly with the Greek alphabet, and from the library he had passed out to the plough. In the years of severe physical labour which followed he had felt the spirit ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... of line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, the Catholic majesty, the popular naivete, the rich and luxuriant vegetation of an epoch of renewal. The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the Iliad, the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... his blunder as fast as possible, Sir James went on to something else, and asked what her ladyship thought of Flaxman's sketches from the Iliad and Odyssey? He had seen the book lying on the library table yesterday: indeed, his eye had been caught, as it lay open, by a striking resemblance—he knew it was very rude to talk of likenesses—but, really, the resemblance was striking between a lady he had in his view, and one of the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... banks of the river. The night was clear; the stars shone above their heads with brilliant splendor. Altogether Mr. Martin was so entranced, that, forgetting the children were his only companions, he broke silence, repeating the following lines: a translation of his own from Homer's Iliad: ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... dispute between the ancients and the moderns is not yet settled; it has been on the table since the silver age succeeded the golden age. Mankind has always maintained that the good old times were much better than the present day. Nestor, in the "Iliad," wishing to insinuate himself as a wise conciliator into the minds of Achilles and Agamemnon, starts by saying to them—"I lived formerly with better men than you; no, I have never seen and I shall never see such great personages as ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... thence the sublimest portions of their mythology. The popular belief that all the gods made an annual visit to the Ethiopians, shows the high estimation in which they were held; for we are not told that such an honor was bestowed on any other nation. In the first book of the Iliad, Achilles is represented as anxious to appeal at once to the highest authorities; but his mother tells him: "Jupiter set off yesterday, attended by all the gods, on a journey toward the ocean, to feast with the excellent Ethiopians, and is not ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... who never saw the frescoes in the Vatican may yet, from engravings, form some notion of the exquisite grace of Raphael, and of the sublimity and energy of Michael Angelo. And so the genius of Homer is seen in the poorest version of the Iliad; the genius of Cervantes is seen in the poorest version of Don Quixote. Let it not be supposed that I wish to dissuade any person from studying either the ancient languages or the languages of modern Europe. Far from it. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The Iliad of Homer came in for its share of consideration at the hands of Antoine and Charles Coypel, who made of it a set of five scenes. It was Romanelli, the Italian, who painted a similar set, a hundred years before, for Cardinal Barberini, which set came to America in the Ffoulke collection. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... sense. The Italians have never, either in the ancient or the modern age, produced a great drama or a national epic, the 'AEneid' and the 'Divine Comedy' being obviously of different species from the 'Iliad' or the 'Nibelungen Lied.' Modern Italians, again, are distinguished from the French, the Germans, and the English in being the conscious inheritors of an older, august, and strictly classical civilisation. The great ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... by Johnson in the Adventurer, may be called a continuation of the Rambler. The Idler, in order to be consistent with the assumed character, is written with abated vigour, in a style of ease and unlaboured elegance. It is the Odyssey, after the Iliad. Intense thinking would not become the Idler. The first number presents a well-drawn portrait of an Idler, and from that character no deviation could be made. Accordingly, Johnson forgets his austere manner, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... leather, pointed at the toes. Save the slippers, the costume from head to foot was of white linen. The air of the man was high, stately, severe. Visvamitra, the greatest of the ascetic heroes of the Iliad of the East, had in him a perfect representative. He might have been called a Life drenched with the wisdom of Brahma—Devotion Incarnate. Only in his eyes was there proof of humanity; when he lifted his face from the Egyptian's breast, they were ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... spirits and to have seen them all assembled in the spacious wigwam. Had some bard taken up the tale of this fortunate individual, the literature of the red man might have boasted an epic ranking perhaps with the AEneid or the Iliad. ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... been pursued. The great obstacle to the popularity of Spencer's splendid work has lain less in its language than in its length. If we add together the three great poems of antiquity — the twenty-four books of the Iliad, the twenty-four books of the Odyssey, and the twelve books of the Aeneid — we get at the dimensions of only one-half of The Faerie Queen. The six books, and the fragment of a seventh, which alone exist of the author's ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... with a sharp sheer and run to a point. A classical scholar would be irresistibly reminded of the Homeric vessels, not as they were in reality, but as they appear in the eager, sea-born suggestions of the Iliad and the Odyssey—long, sharp, swift, well-timbered, hollow, with many thwarts, and ends curved high ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... first cutting of the hair was always an occasion of solemnity among the Greeks, the hair being dedicated to some god. The first instance of this is in Homer's Iliad, where Achilles speaks of having dedicated his hair to the river Spercheius. The Athenian youth offered their hair to Herakles. The Roman emperor Nero, in later times, imitated ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... Comtesse Jules's circle. The last new song or 'bon mot' and the gossip of the day were the sole topics of conversation in the Queen's parties. Wit was banished from them. The Comtesse Diane, more inclined to literary pursuits than her sister-in-law, one day, recommended her to read the "Iliad" and "Odyssey." The latter replied, laughing, that she was perfectly acquainted with the Greek poet, and ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... hour, cares that no other love could yield. These, gentlemen, are the duties and occupations of women; and you must admit, that if it is not our province to command armies, or to add new planets to the galaxy of the firmament; that if we have not produced an Iliad or an AEnead, a Jerusalem Delivered, or a Paradise Lost, an Oratorio of the Creation, a Transfiguration, or a Laocoon, we have not ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... came a doubt if they were any larger and more capable than the minds of women would be if they were properly trained and developed; and she began to dip into the books they prided themselves on having read, to see if they were past her comprehension. She studied Pope's translation of the Iliad and Odyssey indoors, and she also took the little volume out under her arm; but this was a pose, for she could not read out of doors, there were always so many other interests to occupy her attention—birds and beasts, men and women, trees and flowers, land and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a year. His honours were yet far greater than his profits. Every writer mentioned him with respect, and among other testimonies to his merit, Steele made him the patron of his "Miscellany," and Pope inscribed to him his translations of the "Iliad." But he treated the muses with ingratitude; for, having long conversed familiarly with the great, he wished to be considered rather as a man of fashion than of wit; and, when he received a visit from Voltaire, disgusted him by the despicable foppery of desiring to be considered not as an author ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... defunct, the origin of things, the constitution of matter, and the unreality of time." To this period belongs also the earliest conception of The Dynasts, an old note-book containing, under the date June 20th, 1875, the suggestion that the author should attempt "An Iliad of Europe from 1789 ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... were such splendid victories abroad. It was a time, too, when there were almost as many able writers as in Queen Elizabeth's time. The two books written at that day, which you are most likely to have heard of, are Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe, and Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad. ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with my lessons in that language. When I studied my Greek I always led my aunt Claire to the stairway and I sprawled there upon the steps, my feet higher than my head; for two or three years that was the classic pose I took for the study of the Iliad, or Xenophon's Cyropedia. ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... it will be found that several of the subjects to which he devoted much time and labour are not represented in these pages. I have not thought it necessary to reprint any of the numerous pamphlets and articles which he wrote upon the Iliad and Odyssey, since these were all merged in "The Authoress of the Odyssey," which gives his matured views upon everything relating to the Homeric poems. For a similar reason I have not included an essay on the evidence for the Resurrection ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... appreciable loss in working efficiency. [Footnote: Accounts of the experiments will be found in H. S. Williams, op. cit, pp. 5-23, 128, 137; H. S. Warner, op. cit, p. 116. They had some realization of this truth even in the days of the Iliad. Hector says, "Bring me luscious wines, lest they unnerve my limbs and make me lose my wonted powers ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... think with yourself, with what a sting we read Plato's "Atlantic" and the conclusion of the "Iliad," and how we hanker and gape after the rest of the tale, as when some beautiful temple or theatre is shut up. But now the informing of ourselves with the truth herself is a thing so delectable and lovely as if our very life and being were for the sake of ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the author? Who wrote the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Nibelungen-Lied? Let us be thankful ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... (madjoon), which I have learned from Anastasius; and as I had neither a Malay dictionary nor even Adelung's Mithridates, which might have helped me to a few words, I addressed him in some lines from the Iliad, considering that, of such languages as I possessed, Greek, in point of longitude, came geographically nearest to an Oriental one. He worshipped me in a most devout manner, and replied in what I suppose was Malay. In this way I saved my reputation ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... without exacting gifts from the bridegroom. So in the "Iliad" ix. 146: Agamemnon offers Achilles any of ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... in common with the art of Saint Bernard or Adam of Saint-Victor. Whatever art they have, granting that they have any, seems to go back to the cave-dwellers and the age of stone. Compared with the naivete of the "Cantico del Sole," the "Chanson de Roland" or the "Iliad" is a triumph of perfect technique. The value is not in the verse. The "Chant of the Sun" is another "Pons Seclorum"—or perhaps rather a "Pons Sanctorum"—over which only children and saints can pass. It is almost a paraphrase of the sermon to the birds. "Thank you, mi signore, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... of themes and allusions, Lowell is at one with most of the poets of the present day. It used to be the fashion, and is still, for tables of contents in volumes of verse to show titles like these: "Prometheus"; "Iliad VIII, 542-561"; "Alectryon." Present-day volumes are becoming more and more besprinkled with titles like these: "Balder the Beautiful"; "The Death of Arnkel," etc. In this fact alone is seen the turn of the tide. Heroes and ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... and failures—David's speech with Ebn Ezra Bey was of a different sort. If, as it seems ever in the desert, an invisible host of beings, once mortal, now immortal, but suspensive and understanding, listened to the tale he unfolded, some glow of pity must have possessed them; for it was an Iliad of herculean struggle against absolute disaster, ending with the bitter news of his grandfather's death. It was the story of AEdipus overcome by events too strong for soul to bear. In return, as the stars wheeled on, and the moon stole to the zenith, majestic and slow, Ebn Ezra offered ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... means had been found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon, which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... all other translations in the power to rouse and lift and inflame the mind. Some eminent painter, we believe Barry, said that, when he went into the street after reading it, men seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the translation of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written by Homer before he arrived at years of discretion; and Coleridge declares the version of the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman himself evidently thought that he was the first ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... vicar's Homeric lowing for the space of a minute or so—what some one has called, the great beast-like, bellow-like, roar and roll of the Iliad hexameter: it stopped like a cut cord. One of the numerous daughters of his house appeared in the arch of white cluster-roses on the lower garden-terrace, and with an exclamation, stood petrified at the extraordinary spectacle, and then she laughed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... who first raised him from obscurity. He is the greatest, after Dryden, of all the second class poets of his country. His Rape of the Lock, the most original of his poems, established his fame. But his greatest works were the translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, the Dunciad, and his Essay on Man. He was well paid for his labors, and lived in a beautiful villa at Twickenham, the friend of Bolingbroke, and the greatest literary star of his age. But he was bitter and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... that so much has been written of Peter Bell, that the present history can be considered only, like the Iliad, as a continuation of that series of cyclic poems, which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... other poem, the Chanson de Roland deserves to be named the Iliad of the Middle Ages. On August 15, 778, the rearguard of Charlemagne's army, returning from a successful expedition to the north of Spain, was surprised and destroyed by Basque mountaineers in the valley of Roncevaux. Among those who fell was Hrodland (Roland), Count of the march of Brittany. For ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... all well here. I am better since it is not cold any more, and I am working a great deal. I am also doing many water colors, I am reading the Iliad with Aurore, who does not like any translation except Leconte de Lisle's, insisting that Homer ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... the epic poem is simply a narrative in verse. Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to historical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist, or that he imagined ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... the same names according to the number of feet. A verse consisting of a single dactyl is thus dactylic monometer; of two dactyls, dactylic dimeter; and so on up to dactylic hexameter, which is the meter of Homer's "Iliad," Vergil's "AEneid," and Longfellow's "Evangeline" and "Courtship of Miles ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... blindness, and mad with the rage The gods gave to all whom they wished to destroy, You would act a new Iliad, to darken the age With horrors beyond what is told ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... now passed through the Iliad, and seen the anger of Achilles, and the terrible effects of it, at an end, as that only was the subject of the poem, and the nature of epic poetry would not permit our author to proceed to the event of the war, it perhaps may be acceptable to the common reader to give a short account ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing, There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaemon.' —'Iliad,' iii. 243, 244 ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the same sense by Chapman in trans. of Iliad, XI, 417. The usual meaning of the word ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... were to find, under the dbris of Pompeii, a grand tessellated pavement, representing one of the scenes of the "Iliad," but shattered by an earthquake, its fragments dislocated and piled one upon the top of another, it would be our duty and our pleasure to seek, by following the clew of the picture, to re-arrange the fragments ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... kings liberally reward learning that is virtuous and worthy; for learning without virtue is a pearl on a dunghill. He spends the whole day in settling whether Homer expressed himself correctly or not in such and such a line of the Iliad, whether Martial was indecent or not in such and such an epigram, whether such and such lines of Virgil are to be understood in this way or in that; in short, all his talk is of the works of these poets, and those of Horace, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... side of the man and the woman, Hector and Andromache, of the "Iliad," who called upon the immortal gods to bless their child of love; the virgin Isis with her son Horus; the Vedic virgin Indrance, the mother of the savior-god, Indra; Devaki and her Divine child, Chrishna; Hipparchia, Pandora, Protogenia, Cornelia, Plotina, ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... translate the Hector and Andromache scene from the 'Iliad' for her book; and I am ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... is true that reason herself will never attempt directly a struggle with this brutal force which resists her arms, and she will be as far as the son of Saturn in the 'Iliad' from descending into the dismal field of battle, to fight them in person. But she chooses the most deserving among the combatants, clothes him with divine arms as Jupiter gave them to his son-in-law, and by her triumphing force ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Oxford, where he entered Hertford College, he was one of the best men of his time, and one of the wildest. A clergyman, strong in Greek, was arguing with young Fox against the genuineness of a verse of the Iliad because its measure was unusual. Fox at once quoted from ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... with an ambitious eye to Homer, and we see his hand "pawing" like the hoof of the war-horse in Job, as he smelled his battle afar off, and panted to do for Achilles and Hector what he had done for Turnus and AEneas. He meant to have turned the "Iliad" into blank verse; but, after all, translated the only book of it which he published into rhyme. But, in fine, he determined to modernise some of the fine old tales of Boccacio and Chaucer; and in March ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... And Varro, on his part, gives extraordinary but well-deserved praise to Erinna, who, with her three hundred verses, challenged the fame of the brightest light of Greece, and counterbalanced with her one small volume, called the "Elecate," the ponderous "Iliad" of the great Homer. Aristophanes celebrates Carissena, a votary of the same profession, as a woman of great excellence and learning; and the same may be said for Teano, Merone, Polla, Elpe, Cornificia, and Telesilla, to the last of whom, in honour of her marvellous ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... the Sword, too, should the sword "thrust through the fatuous, thrust through the fungous brood." Whatever helps the races to better life sings itself into racial lore, and I alone shall not refuse the tribute. When you come to see that the Iliad is as great a gift to the race as the doings of Achilles, that the Iliads are more significant than the doings they celebrate, you will cease to classify men into doers and singers. You will cease to dishonour yourself in the eyes of the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... vexation a native Greek (viz., a Smyrniot), then by accident in London, called upon him immediately after the publication, and, laying his finger on a line in the exordium (as it then stood), said, 'Sare, I am one countryman of Homer's. He write de Iliad; you write de Henriade; but Homer vos never able in all de total whole of de Iliad to write de verse like dis.' Upon which the Greek showed him ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... history of famous men, that inspired him at his crisis to assume his bravest attire. There is to my mind a flavour in the conceit—a bravado lifting the action above mere intrepidity into actual greatness. Nor in this little Iliad are there many figures that I regard with more affection than that of Admiral Buzza at his garden gate ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... perhaps sometimes multiplied by rumour, but often unheard of and unrecorded. The perils of the stockmen were constant: many of them were repeatedly wounded; and one, named Cubit, was nine times speared, and yet survived. Death assumed new forms daily: the poet of the Iliad did not describe more numerous varieties, in ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... The meals were of first importance, but sandbags are uncomfortable seats, and the heat was trying. Pleasant it was in the cool of the evening to go to sleep with one's Burberry as a pillow. The stars shone kindly down, as they had shone long ago upon the heroes of the Iliad on the Plains of Troy, seven miles away across the Dardanelles, upon the Crusaders and Byzantines. You were asleep in a moment, and hardly stirred until 5 A.M., when it was time for "Stand to." Daylight moved quickly across the desolate waste, and by six o'clock ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... to the Iliad, we have, if not positive proof, at least very good reason, for believing it intended as a series of lyrics; but, granting the epic intention, I can say only that the work is based in an imperfect sense of Art. The modern epic is, of the supposititious ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... of Homer, by Mr. T. A. Buckley, has just appeared in London. No prose version will cause any just notion of the spirit of Homer. Of the half dozen metrical translations published recently, we think that of our countryman Munford the best. Henry W. Herbert has given us parts of the Iliad in admirable style. No one, however, has yet equalled old Chapman—certainly not Pope nor Cowper. The most successful translation into a modern language is unquestionably the German one by Voss. Mure and Grote have written the ablest dissertations in English upon the Homeric ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... written document in the manner of its transmission to posterity. Many a good judge believes that the Homeric poems are older than the art of writing, and, consequently, that they were handed down to posterity orally. Yet no one would say that the Iliad and Odyssey ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... rise and fall with his subject. Big words on small matters may serve as a pretty exact definition of the burlesque; an instance of which they will find in the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, but none in the Iliad. ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... a prose epic, and his fighting scenes are as real, spirited, and life-like as the combats in the Iliad.—The Press (Phila.). ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... confirmed the choice, and acknowledged the emperor's adopted son as his successor. In a letter which Nerva sent at once to Trajan, he quoted most significantly a line from the beginning of the "Iliad," where Chryses, insulted by Achilles, prays to Apollo: "May thy shafts afford me vengeance on the Greeks for my tears." After a little hesitation Trajan accepted the position, which was marked by the titles of Imperator, Caesar, and Germanicus, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... Helen but a dream, yet, through Homer's power of representing men and women, those old Greeks will still stand out from amidst the darkness of the ancient world with a sharpness of outline which belongs to no period of history except the most recent. For the mere hard purposes of history, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are the most effective books which ever were written. We see the hall of Menelaus, we see the garden of Alcinous, we see Nausicaa among her maidens on the shore, we see the mellow monarch sitting ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... below, mistily crowned With towering memories, and beyond her shone The wine-dark seas Achilles heard resound! Only, and after many days, we found Dabbled with dew, at border of a wood Bedded in hyacinths, open and a-glow Thy Homer's Iliad.... Dryad tears had drowned The rough Greek type and, as with honey or blood, One crocus with crushed gold Stained the great page that told Of gods that sighed their loves on ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... into his grave this silver mask of an ox head with golden horns. It was a symbol of the cattle sacrificed for the dead. There is a gold rosette between the eyes. The mouth, muzzle, eyes and ears are gilded. In Homer's Iliad, which is the story of the Trojan war, Diomede says, "To thee will I sacrifice a yearling heifer, broad at brow, unbroken, that never yet hath man led beneath the yoke. Her will I sacrifice to thee, and gild her horns ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall
... is true, in Dryden's great Ode, but what kind of a figure? He got drunk,—in very bad company, too,—and then turned fire-bug. He had one redeeming point,—he did value his Homer, and slept with the Iliad under his pillow. A poet like Homer seems to me worth a dozen such fellows as ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... their devotion to their benefactors. Then into existence sprang the most inconsistent and irreconcilable fictions. The deified mortals, with their foibles and frailities, were transmitted to posterity in the most glorious manner possible, and hence accordingly, in both the Odyssey and the Iliad of Homer, we have a strange and heterogeneous mixture of what is not only mighty in heroes, but also that which is ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... of AEneas is in imitation of Homer's beautiful description in the Iliad of the shield of Achilles, also made ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... such a conception and the grandeur of the transformation it imposes on human faculties and habits, read, in turn, the great Christian poem and the great pagan poem, one the 'Divine Comedy' and the other the 'Odyssey' and the 'Iliad.' Dante has a vision and is transported out of our little ephemeral sphere into eternal regions; he beholds its tortures, its expiations and its felicities; he is affected by superhuman anguish and horror; all that the infuriate and subtle imagination ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... associated with many remarkable circumstances in Hindu mythology and history. His genealogy and the principal events of his life are narrated in the Ramayana, the first of the two epic poems which were to the Hindus what the Iliad and the Odyssey were to the Greeks. He was originally of the regal caste; and, having raised himself to the rank of a Brahman by the length and rigour of his penance, he became the preceptor of Ramachandra, who was the hero of the Ramayana, and ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... first and the prince of poets; he celebrated the siege of Troy in the Iliad and Odyssey, two epic poems which have never been surpassed. In the same kind of composition he was followed, nine hundred years after, by Virgil, in the Eneid; by Tasso, after another fifteen hundred years, in the 'Jerusalem Delivered.' ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... version of the Iliad and Odyssey are preserved in the British Museum in three volumes, the gift of David Mallet. They are written chiefly on the backs of letters, amongst which are several from Addison, Steele, Jervaise, Rowe, Young, Caryl, Walsh, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Fenton, Craggs, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... order that his soldiers should not remain inactive, and not being able to practice actual warfare, they might amuse themselves with mimic conflicts. For which reason Palamedes played it with Thersites, as Homer tells us in the second book of the Iliad, so also did the other heroes of the Grecian armies, as is related by Euripides ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... nothing truly ancient but the names and some vague traditions. Mr M'Queen alledged that Homer was made up of detached fragments. Dr Johnson denied this; observing, that it had been one work originally, and that you could not put a book of the Iliad out of its place; and he believed the same might be ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... the reason. Troy would not have been consumed if Prometheus had not given fire to man, and the Greeks made war on Priam. AEschylus would not have written his Prometheus had there been no fire, just as Homer would not have written the Iliad had there been no Trojan war. I think it better to have Prometheus and the Iliad than a small and shabby city, which was unclean, I think, and wretched, and in which at best there would be now some procurator annoying thee through quarrels with ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... perspective, and the Doric portal of the town-house, answered in some measure the idea Montfaucon gives us of the scene of an ancient tragedy. Whenever a pompous Flemish painter attempts a representation of Troy, and displays in his background those streets of palaces described in the Iliad, Augsburg, or some such city, may easily be traced. Sometimes a corner of Antwerp discovers itself; and generally, above a Corinthian portico, rises a Gothic spire. Just such a jumble may be viewed from the statue of Augustus, under which I remained till the Concierge came, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... subject, and numerous articles from the same pen on miscellaneous subjects, which have been collected and reprinted, seemed as a relaxation from his severe scientific studies. Like certain other great mathematicians Herschel was also a poet, and he published a translation of the Iliad into blank verse. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... process with an unexampled vehemence strange in one so modern and so versed in mechanical and chemical science. "I!" he would rage. "What have I done to merit portraiture? Have I builded a city, or painted a masterpiece, or served my country, or composed an iliad?" Again, "Better a single faulty human effort than the most perfect ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... to reject the attributes of the Olympian divinities, their human passions and actions, another asserts that they must once have all existed as men. While one denounces the impudent atheists who find fault with the myths of the Iliad, ignorant of its allegorical meaning, another resolves all its heroes into the elements; and still another, hoping to reconcile to the improved moral sense of the times the indecencies and wickednesses of the gods, imputes them all to demons; an idea which found much ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Elizabeth B. Bryant. Byron. Burns. Campbell. Chaucer. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Coleridge. Cowper. Dante. Evangeline. Familiar Quotations. Favorite Poems. Goethe. Goldsmith. Hood. Hemans, Mrs. Homer's Odyssey. Homer's Iliad. Hiawatha. Holmes. Idylls of the King. In Memoriam. Kipling. Keble's Christian Year. Longfellow. Lady of the Lake. Lalla Rookh. Light of Asia. Lowell. Lucile. Marmion. Miles Standish, Courtship of Milton. ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... to Homer, were probably, in part at least, translations. He is a better poet than Hesiod, who has, indeed, but little merit![49] Virgil has no originality. His epic poem is a mere echo of the Iliad, softened down in tone for the polite ears of Augustus and his courtiers. Virgil is inferior to Tasso. Tasso's characters are more vivid and distinct than Virgil's, and greatly more interesting. Virgil wants genius. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... inasmuch as that article remains in a melted state now since we are out of ice, it is fair to give him the credit of getting one long word in the right place, anyhow, for once in his life. He said, in Rome, that the Pope was a noble-looking old man, but he never did think much of his Iliad. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... written, and he detects here the signs of interpolation and addition. According to his view, there is in the poem, as we possess it, an original whole, which he calls the Achilleis, to which additions have been made from other sources, converting the Achilleis into an Iliad. But our readers would prefer to have the words themselves of the author; and the following passage will present them with a very intelligent view of this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... door to the left, and please press the push button. In her small parlor the pictures of the Bonanza Kings hung on the walls and she was wont, an old rheumatic figure in shiny black with the miniature pinned at her withered throat, to point to these and tell stories of the great Iliad ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Exeter, and some time chaplain to the King. He was distinguished by superior talents as a scholar, and a critical knowledge of the Greek language. His "Extracts from Mr. Pope's Translation, corresponding with the Beauties of Homer, selected from the Iliad," ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... received an academical education before he lost his sight; and, aided by a memory of uncommon powers, he taught the classics, and particularly Greek, with much higher reputation than any other schoolmaster within a pretty extensive circuit. Two of his pupils read all the Iliad, and all or the greater part of Sophocles. After hearing a long sentence of Greek or Latin distinctly recited, he could generally construe and translate it with little or no hesitation. He was always much gratified by Telford's visits, which were not infrequent, ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... the awful locks.—Ver. 179. This awful nod of Jupiter, the sanction by which he confirms his decrees, is an idea taken from Homer; by whom it is so vividly depicted at the end of the first book of the Iliad, that Phidias, in his statue of that God, admired for the awful majesty of its looks, is said to have derived his conception of the features from that description. Virgil has the same idea in the AEneid, book x; 'Annuit, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... carping at the great men who had been lying a hundred years in Poets' Corner. Even the inmates of Grub Street, even the heroes of the Dunciad, were for once just to living merit. There can be no stronger illustration of the estimation in which Congreve was held than the fact that the English Iliad, a work which appeared with more splendid auspices than any other in our language, was dedicated to him. There was not a duke in the kingdom who would not have been proud of such a compliment. Dr. Johnson expresses great admiration for the independence of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... would hardly be proper; that would here be better. When such nouns are strictly of the neuter gender, which may represent them; as, "The committees which were appointed." But where the idea of rationality is predominant, who or whom seems not to be improper; as, "The conclusion of the Iliad is like the exit of a great man out of company whom he has entertained magnificently."—Cowper. "A law is only the expression of the desire of a multitude who have power to punish."—Brown's Philosophy ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... African departed from the Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from that ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... great thing to say, we are always compelled to speak so simply in monosyllables? Perhaps this, too, is an example of the law that continually reduces many to one,—the unity giving the substance of the plurality; but as the heroes of the "Iliad" were obliged to repeat the messages of the gods literatim, so we must say a great thing as it comes to us, by itself. It is curious to me now, that I was not the least excited in announcing the discovery,—not because I did not feel the force of it, but because my mind was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... cheated, not for being served. Five thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day to your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. How much do you think Homer got for his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? only bitter bread and salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. In science, the man who discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid with a dungeon; the man ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... buried the Game Chicken that night (we had not much of a tea) in the back green of his house in Melville Street, No. 17, with considerable gravity and silence; and being at the time in the "Iliad," and, like all boys, Trojans, we ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... 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
... the [Greek: oulos oneiros], or evil dream, which, in the second book of the Iliad, Jupiter sends down to Agamemnon, to lure him to give battle to the Trojans ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik |
