"Odyssey" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Felix Weingartner, whose 'Genesius' (1892) and 'Orestes' (1902) are said to contain much fine music; of August Bungert, whose trilogy founded upon the Odyssey has been received with favour in Dresden, though it does not appear to have made much way elsewhere; and of Hans Pfitzner, whose 'Rose von Liebesgarten' (1901) is one of the most promising operas of the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Major, Paradoxes, Scipio's Dream, Letter to Quintus. Cicero On Oratory and Orators. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, The Nature of the Gods, and The Commonwealth. Juvenal. Xenophon. Homer's Iliad. Homer's Odyssey. Herodotus. Demosthenes. 2 Vols. Thucydides. AEschylus. Sophocles. Euripides. 2 ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... satisfied with the antiquity of the dance, practically as we have it, from lines 187-8, Book VI. of the Odyssey: ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... rolled back and forth helpless families—women, children, slaves—found precarious safety together with great hardship by withdrawing to remote places which invasion was little likely to reach. An Odyssey of hard travel, often by night and half secret, is part of the war tradition of thousands of Southern families. And here, as always, the heroic women, smiling, indomitable, are the center of the picture. Their flight ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... as homogeneous even as the Iliad and Odyssey, which give us a fairly consistent and truthful picture of a single age, we should be in a very happy position. Unfortunately this is not the case. Our epic began as a Bharata, or Tale of the Bharata Clan, probably of very moderate bulk, not later than 600 B.C., and perhaps considerably ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... both by sea and land, experienced on the way as many adventures, vicissitudes, and mishaps, as the far-famed heroes of the Odyssey; they reached their destination at different times, bearing tidings to Mr. Astor of the ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... books to the noisy crowd around him. Sam seemed to behold him arranging his literary merchandise upon the stall in such a way as was best calculated to attract notice. Here was Addison's Spectator, a long row of little volumes; here was Pope's translation of the Iliad and Odyssey; here were Dryden's poems, or those of Prior. Here, likewise, were Gulliver's Travels, and a variety of little gilt-covered children's books, such as Tom Thumb, Jack the Giant Queller, Mother Goose's Melodies, and others which ...
— Biographical Stories - (From: "True Stories of History and Biography") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... once more and sat up long after bedtime to finish the tale. Mr. Gladstone caught a glimpse of it at a friend's house and did not rest the next day until he had procured a copy for himself, and Andrew Lang said: "This is the kind of stuff a fellow wants. I don't know when, except Tom Sawyer and the Odyssey, that I ever ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... already done for that of Italy, but never found the leisure for it.[16] Rossetti had no knowledge of Greek, and "the only classical poet," says his brother, "whom he took to in any degree worth speaking of was Homer, the 'Odyssey' considerably more than the 'Iliad.'" This, I presume, he knew only in translation, but the preference is significant, since, as we have seen, the "Odyssey" is the most romantic of epics. Among English poets, he preferred ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of jesters at the courts of the barons? What should we do without the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' the 'Compleat Angler,' 'Pepys' Diary,' and all the rest of the ancient books? And, going back a few centuries, what an amount we should miss had we not 'AEsop's Fables,' the 'Odyssey,' the tales of the Trojan War, and so on. It is from the archaeologist that one must expect the augmentation of this supply; and just in that degree in which the existing supply is really a necessary part of our equipment, ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... when the Moral hath so required. But besides this kind of Fable, there is another in which the Actors are Passions, Virtues, Vices, and other imaginary Persons of the like Nature. Some of the ancient Criticks will have it, that the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer are Fables of this Nature: and that the several Names of Gods and Heroes are nothing else but the Affections of the Mind in a visible Shape and Character. Thus they tell us, that Achilles, in the first Iliad, represents Anger, or the Irascible Part of Human Nature; ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... imaginations that had perfected it; but I was led off, hypnotized, to see the furnaces and boilers under the earth. And even there we were almost alone, to such an extent had one sort of senseless matter been compelled to take charge of another sort of senseless matter. The odyssey of the coal that was lifted high out of ships on the tide beyond, to fall ultimately into the furnaces within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by itself epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four million cubic feet ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... that is to say, or comes into fashion, or gains reputation, or renown, or fame, or favor with the public (for by these names we know the rungs of the ladder by which we climb to the higher heights above and beyond them),—every one who comes even thus far is the hero of a dreadful Odyssey. Brilliant portents rise above the mental horizon through a combination of a thousand accidents; conditions change so swiftly that no two men have been known to reach success by the same road. Canalis and Nathan are two dissimilar cases; things never fall out in the same ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... with the Iliad and Odyssey the Hymns must appear disappointing, if he come to them with an expectation of discovering merits like those of the immortal epics. He will not find that they stand to the Iliad as Milton's "Ode to the ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... these; while to their lowly dome, The full-fed swine return'd with evening home; Compell'd, reluctant, to the several sties, With din obstreperous, and ungrateful cries. Pope's Odyssey ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... me, although she made fun of him as she did so, about that 'Odyssey' of the barricades and of the hulks which made up Bakounine's history, and which is, nevertheless, the exact truth; about his adventures as chief of the insurgents at Prague and then at Dresden; of ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... mistakes, and the everlastingly warning calls of his name maddened him. In the theoretical work he was naturally far in advance of his comrades; for, despite idleness at school, this was mere child's play to his practised memory. He, who had had to learn hundreds of lines of the "Odyssey" by heart, could easily remember facts about the bores ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... The Authoress of the Odyssey, ch. ix. He did it to show the situation of Trapani and the Islands with Marettimo "all highest up in the sea." In the Odyssey Ithaca is "all highest up in the sea," and Butler supposed that the authoress in so describing it was ...
— The Samuel Butler Collection - at Saint John's College Cambridge • Henry Festing Jones
... Poems" in 1866; and in 1876 a complete illustrated edition of his poetical writings. To the honors which these volumes brought him he added fresh laurels in 1870 and 1871 by the publication of his translation of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"—a translation which was highly praised both at home and abroad, and which, if not the best that the English language is capable of, is, in many respects, the best which any English-writing poet has ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... gorget, and sash; a deal table stood in the proximity of the rusty grate, where smoked and smouldered a pile of black turf from the bog—a deal table without a piece of baize to cover it, yet fraught with things not devoid of interest: a Bible, given by a mother; the Odyssey, the Greek Odyssey; a flute, with broad silver keys; crayons, moreover, and water colours, and a sketch of a wild prospect near, which, though but half finished, afforded ample proof of the excellence and skill of the boyish ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... church till they began to look on a day of rest as a penal institution, and to transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion of defective inspiration which was awakened in them by the preaching. The true type of the allegory is the Odyssey, which we read without suspicion as pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in divining its double meaning, as if we somehow got a better bargain of our author than he meant to give us. But this complex feeling must not be so exacting as to prevent our lapsing into ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... This story, from the Odyssey, is also of an unknown antiquity. Ulysses, after many years of absence, returns to his home to find himself unrecognized by his family. With Eumaeus Ulysses ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... Passing into Greek literature, we find laughter constantly termed "sweet." In Iliad xxi, "Saturn smiled sweetly at seeing his daughter;" in xxiii. "The chiefs arose to throw the shield, and the Greeks laughed, i.e., with joy." In Odyssey, xx. 390, they prepare the banquet with laughter. Od. xxii., 542, Penelope laughs at Telemachus sneezing, when she is talking of Ulysses' return; she takes it for a good omen. And in the Homeric Hymns, which, although inferior ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... from the 1949 book A Martian Odyssey and Others by Stanley G. Weinbaum, pp. 1-27. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... gratitude; and these germs bear fruit, as the child develops into the man. We have also an instinct which attracts us towards the pursuit of wisdom; such is the true meaning of the Sirens' voices in the Odyssey, says the philosopher, quoting from the poet ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... whom were also the Roman chiefs (according to Dio),—Remus, that is to say, and Romulus, whom a wolf (lykaina) suckled, called by the Italians lupa; this name has been aptly used metaphorically as a title for the demi-monde. (Eustathius on the Odyssey, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... the boldest book ever written. There are no similitudes in Ossian or the Iliad or the Odyssey so daring. Its imagery sometimes seems on the verge of the reckless, but only seems so. The fact is that God would startle and arouse and propel men and nations. A tame and limping similitude would fail to accomplish the object. While there are times when He ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... the coast, near Terracina. The Promontoria Circeo is the traditional site of the palace and grave of Circe, whose story is told in the Odyssey.—D.O.] ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... operation of that law appear, and the less promising the future of mankind. If people tell me the world is not getting better, I suggest that it might be worth their while to read a chapter of mediaeval or primitive history. In the "Odyssey," for instance, Homer sketches for us the career of a strong and remarkable man. His hero, supposed to be a paragon of virtue, is capable of things you would call scoundrelism to-day. He and his band of storm-tossed companions ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... the different churches with which they were connected, and each sham burial service was entered in the parish registers, a snare and stumbling-block to the historian. This curious custom is very ancient. Thus we read in the Odyssey that when Menelaus heard in Egypt of the death of Agamemnon he reared for him a cenotaph, and piled an empty barrow "that the fame of the dead man might never be quenched." Probably this old usage gave rise to the claims of several Greek cities to possess the tomb ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... watering-places in the novels of Mr. H.G. WELLS. When I thought of those seven men—one, alas, disembodied—so strangely attired yet so careful of elementary hygiene, driven by that fierce typhoon, with that bird of portent in the skies, arriving suddenly with the salt of their Odyssey upon their brows at the beach of the genteel and respectable Sussex town, and visiting a perhaps slightly perturbed Auntie Isabel, and afterwards the fire-escape, I felt that here was the glimpse of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... writer Parthey doubts this Hellenic origin on etymological grounds, and also because etna was by no means regarded as a luminous beacon for ships or wanderers, in the same manner as the ever-travailing Stromboli (Strongyle), to which Homer seems to refer in the Odyssey (xii., 68, 202, and 219), and its geographical position was not so well determined. I suspect that tna would be found to be a Sicilian word, if we had any fragmentary materials to refer to. According to Diodorus (v., 6), the Sicani, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... is redolent with the spirit of the Odyssey, that glorious primitive epic, fresh with the dew of the morning of time. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read his recital of the adventures of the wily Odysseus. Howard Pyle's illustrations render the spirit of the Homeric age with ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... station in sight; you have been brought, like so many sheep or cows, into the dismal goods station, and you look in vain for the people who should be there to welcome you, to throw flowers, and to cheer as you arrive at the first halt of your great Odyssey. However, you shake yourself, you bundle your valise out of the carriage on to the railway line, and, with your late carriage companions, you go across to the sentry and ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... glossary. He might learn from Chapman's version, however, that it is not the widest choice of archaic words, but intensity of conception and phrase, that gives a poem life, and keeps it living, in spite of grave defects. Where Chapman, in a famous passage, ("Odyssey," v. 612,) tells us, that, when Ulysses crawled ashore after his shipwreck, "the sea had soaked his heart through," it is not the mere simplicity of the language, but the vivid conception which went before and compelled the simplicity, that is impressive. We believe ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... third of four parts of a cyclus, called the Odyssey, and its success since its first representation in Dresden on December 12th 1896 has been so absolute, that one may hope to hear the other parts before long. It must be admitted here, that this is due ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... away from the enlightened eyesight of the Greeks, and changed into space besprinkled with stars; when Zeus no longer held his divine court on its mystic summit; when oracles became mute and the fabled wonders of the "Odyssey" either vanished, or resolved themselves into prosaic commonplaces under the investigations of the skeptic or the accidental discoverer, the Church made a most strenuous protest against the destruction of ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... days the fall of the leaf does not bring sadness, only meditation. Earth seemed to loose the record of past summer hours from her permanent life, as lightly, and spontaneously, as the great genius casts behind him a literature,—the Odyssey he has outgrown. In the evening the rain ceased, the west wind came, and we went out in the boat again for some hours; indeed, we staid till the last clouds passed from the moon. Then we climbed the hill to see the full light in solemn sweetness ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the "Odyssey." He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside "Henry V." Such a literary man is simply outside all literature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot. For if there is a wall between you and the world, it ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... with the hotel-keepers; but it was Mr. Buttles's loftier task to entertain in their own tongues the unknown geniuses who flocked about the Hickses, and Nick could imagine how disconcerting his departure must be on the eve of their Grecian cruise which Mrs. Hicks would certainly call an Odyssey. ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... hear of any one who ever printed the Iliad or the Odyssey. No printer was ever heard of among the immortals. A printer just prints—that is all. Solomon never ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... sleep is hurtful" is marked by a thick score in the Odyssey (45, 393) by Beethoven's hand. See Schindler's ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... incident are published in 'Cymmrodor,' v. I. In these we have either the taboo on the name, or the taboo on the touch of iron. In a widely diffused superstition iron 'drives away devils and ghosts,' according to the Scholiast on the eleventh book of the 'Odyssey,' and the Oriental Djinn also flee from iron. {82c} Just as water is fatal to the Aryan frog-bride and to the Red Indian beaver-wife, restoring them to their old animal forms, so the magic touch of iron breaks love between the Welshman and ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... 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 seriously considered as ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... often than not the words, retrieved from oblivion, were less than worth the effort; no poet had builded the chant, which, rather, grown to goodly proportions of perhaps a hundred verses, had resulted from a natural evolution like a modern Odyssey, or some sprawling vine which was what it was because of its environment. But while lines were faulty and rhymes were bad, and the composition never rose above the commonplace, and often enough sank below ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... days to fall from the centre to the nadir. Some of the ancients seem to have surmised the sphericity of the earth, and to have thought that Hades was simply its dark side, the dead being our antipodes. In the Odyssey, Ulysses reaches Hades by sailing across the ocean stream and passing the eternal night land of the Cimmerians, whereupon he comes to the edge of Acheron, the moat of Pluto's sombre house. Virgil also says, "One pole of the earth to us always points aloft; ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 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 translator who had been admitted into intimate relations with Homer's soul, and caught by direct contact the sacred fury ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... been that, all unversed in the arts of the wily Greek, the deceiver of gods, the lover of strange women, the evoker of bloodthirsty shades, I yet longed for the beginning of my own obscure Odyssey, which, as was proper for a modern, should unroll its wonders and terrors beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The disdainful ocean did not open wide to swallow up my audacity, though the ship, the ridiculous and ancient galere of my folly, the ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... languid Lord Hervey's mother, and adoring Mr. Pope received these marvellous letters, which were destined to rank with the epistles of the younger Pliny and of Madame de Sevigne. Mr. Pope—whose translation of the "Odyssey" had not yet made its appearance—may well have thought that Ulysses himself had not seen men and cities to greater advantage than the beautiful wanderer whom he was destined first {150} to love and then to hate. As we read her letters we seem to live with her in the great, gay, gloomy life ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... ships of the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and other people of antiquity, had frequently more than one rudder; but it is not easy to perceive in what way more than one could be applied to the same end for which the rudder of modern ships is used. Small vessels had only one. Homer in his Odyssey mentions only one, which was fastened, and perhaps strengthened, so as to withstand the winds and waves on each side, with hurdles, made of sallow or osier; at the same period the ships of the Phoenicians had ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... unfortunate enough to come into their domains. The ogres known as the Cyclops, and the fierce anthropophages, called Lestrygons, of Sicily, who were neighbors of the Cyclops, are pictured in detail in the "Odyssey" of Homer. Nearly all the nations of the earth have their fairy tales or superstitions of monstrous beings inhabiting some forest, mountain, or cave; and pages have been written in the heroic poems of all languages describing battles ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Odysseus Daertiades hos pasi doloisi Anthropoisi melo, kai meu kleos ouranon ikei.] Odyssey, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... large collection he brought from Italy to Jesus College, Cambridge. It is scattered and gone from there, but books of Gunthorpe's survive in a good many libraries. One deserves special mention—a Latin prose version of the Odyssey, which he picked up (not in Italy, though it is an Italian book, but at Westminster) in 1475. Probably it was the first copy of the Odyssey in any form that had come to this country since Roman times, unless, indeed, Archbishop Theodore brought one over in the seventh ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... not what the actual heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey wore; but we do know that what Homer describes, he must have seen. Was Homer, therefore, the contemporary of the siege of Troy?—or does he not rather speak of the customs and costumes of his own time, and apply them to the traditions of the heroic ages of Greece? Whatever ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Mr Grote, from whom we quote these instances, adds that he has the misfortune to dissent both from Lachmann and Ulrici; for to him it appears a mistake to put (as Ulrici and others have done) the Iliad and the Odyssey on the same footing. The sort of compromise which Mr Grote offers seems very fair; but, for our part, we beg to reserve the point; we will not commit ourselves on so delicate a subject, by a hasty assent. But we promise to read ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... comedies and tragedies, of which Cicero (Brutus 18) speaks very contemptuously, as "Livianae fabulae non satis dignae quae iterum legantur,"—not worth reading a second time. He also wrote a Latin Odyssey, and some hymns, and died ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... preference among novelists. He read with pencil in hand, and he had an elaborate system of marking a book. Aristotle, St. Augustine, Dante and Bishop Butler were the authors who had the deepest influence upon him, so he himself said. His copy of the Odyssey of Homer he had rebound several times, as he preferred always ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... odyssey home. But during post-mission leave, it kept bothering me. I checked, and came up with what I'd already known: Scott had been sole survivor, and the others were certified dead. But about Scott, I got a runaround. He'd apparently vanished. Oh, they'd check for me, but that could take ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... individuals in the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio drew their inspiration. The former, as is well known, owned and kept with religious care a Greek Homer, which he was unable to read. A complete Latin translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, though a very bad one, vas made at Petrarch's suggestion, and with Boccaccio's help, by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato. But with the fifteenth century began the long list of new discoveries, the systematic creation of libraries by means of copies, and the rapid multiplication ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... exploits, like the labors of Hercules The faults and foibles of deified mortals were transmitted to posterity and incorporated with the attributes of the supreme divinity, and hence the mixture of the mighty and the mean which marks the characters of the Iliad and Odyssey. The Greeks adopted Oriental fables, and accommodated them to those heroes who figured in their own country in the earliest times. "The labors of Hercules originated in Egypt, and relate to the annual progress of the sun in the zodiac. The rape of Proserpine, the wanderings of Ceres, the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... set the example, it has been the manifest destiny of every enterprising journalist to take an occasional trip across the continent, and personally inspect his subscribers. The latest overland Odyssey of this kind—transacted by three silent editors and one very public Speaker—is recorded in Mr. Bowles's new book; which proceeds, as one may observe, from his own publishing office and bindery, and may therefore almost claim, like the quaint little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of life in the Middle Ages the stories are of the greatest value. The geography is confused, as it is in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and facts are sometimes mixed up with magic, but modern critics believe there was a real Arthur, who lived about ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... a characteristic passion for strong, abnormal men. This type reappears in almost all his narratives. Here it is old Isergil, whose Odyssey of Love swells to saga-like magnitude. There we find the bold and fearless smuggler Chelkash, in the story of that name. Now it is the brazen, wanton, devoted Malva, who prefers the grown man to the inexperienced youth. Anon, the red Vaska, boots and janitor of the brothel. And there ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... what was the date that this religion was laughed away. I can remember perfectly the downfall of the Homeric deities—how many years there were when the common people believed in the divine origin of the Odyssey, while the educated classes were more or less discreetly heretical, until at last the whole Olympian outfit became poetic myths. But strangely enough I do not recall just the date when we began to demand a god of dignity ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... which he translated, and to maintain in the quietude of his country home in Roslyn, Long Island, his old acquaintance with the Greek and Latin classics. From this continued study there resulted naturally in 1870 his elaborate translation of Homer's Iliad, which was followed by that of the Odyssey in 1871. These scholarly works, cast in strong and polished blank verse, won high praise from American critics, and even achieved a popular success, although they were not warmly acclaimed, in England. Among literarians they are ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was couching his Iliad and Odyssey, had any thought upon those allegories which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, Phornutus, squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again from them? If you trust it, with neither hand ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... bath for the feet, which the sultry weather, and the morasses he had traversed, rendered highly acceptable. He was not, indeed, so luxuriously attended upon this occasion as the heroic travellers in the Odyssey; the task of ablution and abstersion being performed, not by a ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... be out of the Odyssey before this will reach you, counting only two hundred lines a day since we parted. You may begin the Iliad, if you please. Since you are at uncle B.'s, I will not now pretend to inquire into the motives, much ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... in point of fact, as old as literature itself. They date back to the very origin of polite letters, both prose and poetic. It matters nothing whether there was one Homer, or whether there may have been a score of Homers, so far as the fact of oral publication applies to the Iliad and the Odyssey, nearly a thousand years (900) before the foundation of Christianity. By the lips of a single bard, or of a series of bards, otherwise of public declaimers or reciters, the world was first familiarised ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... Homer had stolen from anterior poets whatever was most remarkable in the Iliad and Odyssey. Naucrates even points out the source in the library at Memphis in a temple of Vulcan, which according to him the blind bard completely pillaged. Undoubtedly there were good poets before Homer; how absurd to conceive that an elaborate poem could be the first! We have indeed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... that remained to him of life he embarked upon a veritable Odyssey: he scoured Scotland from the Border to St. Andrews, and finally contrived a journey oversea to Ireland, where he made the name of Daniel O'Brien a terror to well-doers. Insolent and careless, he lurched from prison to prison; ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Frederic Harrison in his delightful volume 'The Choice of Books,' that I will refrain from poaching upon his preserve, and will content myself by remarking that the recommendations of this excellent judge are the 'Iliad' of Lord Derby and the 'Odyssey' of Philip Worsley. This last is a beautiful translation in the Spenserian stanza, of which a second edition appeared in 1868, in two octavo volumes. But if you are not already acquainted with Mr. Harrison's work you will do well to obtain ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... episode in Jeremy's year has, be it thoroughly understood, no plot nor climax to it—it is simply the chronicle of an Odyssey. Nor can it be said to have been anything but a very ordinary Odyssey to the outside observer who, if he be a parent, will tell you that going to the seaside with the family is the most bothering thing in the world, and if he is a bachelor or old maid will tell you that being in the same carriage ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... is the daughter of Proteus—the old man of the sea. A legend concerning her is found in the 4th book of the Odyssey.] ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of the old Greek myths woven into the story of the Odyssey make this book a good introduction to the glories of the Golden Age. "A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... a dead bird.]—The curious word, [Greek: empeplegmenen], seems to be taken from Odyssey xxii. 469, where it is applied to birds caught in a snare. As to the motives of Oedipus, his first blind instinct to kill Jocasta as a thing that polluted the earth; when he saw her already ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... of quoting Homer on all occasions, and was reputed to know the whole "Iliad" and "Odyssey" by heart. He modestly disavowed this tribute to his learning, but without giving up the quotations that seemed to justify it. It is true ill-natured people said his verses were not always quite ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... original. But at the same time, either I have no skill in criticism, and have been reading Greek for fifty years to none effect, or Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language. He is nearer in the Iliad than in the Odyssey—an advantage resulting from his choice of vehicle. In the Odyssey he chose the heroic couplet, which never can give the rise and fall of the hexameter. In the Iliad, after some hesitation between the two (he began as early as 1598), he preferred the fourteener, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of the adventures of a certain Encolpius, as told by himself. Encolpius comes in contact with Priapus in Massilia, Cumae, and Croton; and probably the wrath of Priapus (a parody of the wrath of Poseidon in the Odyssey) is the leading motive that binds the disjointed ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... these we find the minstrel everywhere a central figure, an honored guest, ready at call to entertain the company with some ballad of the ancient times, or to improvise a new one appropriate to the case in hand. The heroes themselves were not loth to take part in these exercises. Ulysses, the Odyssey tells us, occasionally took the lyre in his own hand and sang a rhapsody of his own adventures. Several centuries later, Solon, one of the famed seven wise men of Greece, composed the rhapsody of "Salamis, or the Lost Island," and sang it in a public assembly of the Athenians with so much ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... as the hurling of a javelin or shooting of an arrow over the enemy's ranks as a "sacratio" to Woden of the foe at the beginning of a battle. This is recorded in the older vernacular authorities also, in exact accordance with the Homeric usage, "Odyssey" ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... his pictorial descriptions, but also sometimes in pithy reflections on life and human nature; and it is in these latter that Emerson often comes close to him. Most widely known of Homer's epigrams is that reply of Telemachus to Antiochus in the Odyssey, which Pope has rendered: ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... nine cubits in breadth, and nine fathoms tall. They even threatened the immortals, raising the din of tumultuous war on Olympus, and strove to set Ossa upon Olympus and wood-clad Pelion upon Ossa, in order to scale heaven. But Jove destroyed them both." Odyssey, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... quite enough. Bacon's interpretation, "the Sirens, or pleasures," which has become universal since his time, is opposed alike to Plato's meaning and Homer's. The Sirens are not pleasures, but Desires: in the Odyssey they are the phantoms of vain desire; but in Plato's Vision of Destiny, phantoms of divine desire; singing each a different note on the circles of the distaff of Necessity, but forming one harmony, to which the three great Fates put words. Dante, however, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the books themselves showing similarities of style and method of treating subjects too great for us to admit non-identity in the writers. M. Reynaud lived at a time when it was all the fashion to suggest that old works that had come down to us, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even such national epics as the Cid and the Arthur Legends and the Nibelungenlied were to be attributed to several writers rather than to one. We have passed that period of criticism, however, and have reverted to the idea of single authorship for these works, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... consider its functions in those in whom it is unique. Fortunately scholars in every age have preserved important facts concerning the power of recollection. The classic orators contain repeated reference to traveling singers, who could recite the entire Iliad and Odyssey. In his "Declamations," speaking of the inroads disease had made upon him, Seneca remarks that he could speak two thousand words and names in the order read to him, and that one morning he listened to the reading of two hundred verses ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... of the Adirondacks had its drawbacks, as had Davos; and Stevenson, who, a few years before had felt the sharp pinch of poverty at San Francisco, now chartered from there a ship of his own, and sailed away out of the Golden Gate, on his South Sea Odyssey, to those islands he had heard of years before, little thinking, as he listened "till he was sick with desire to go there," that talk was to be as a sign-post to him where to travel to. "For Louis' sake," his mother explains in her racy journal letters, speaking of having chartered the Casco, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... her face as well as she could. A little old translation of the Odyssey had been among the books in the North Tolland library, and she was more "up" in the "companions of Ulysses" than ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... demi."—Fournier, L'Esprit dans l'Histoire. What shall we say to the story told by Zonaras and repeated by Pancirole, of the burning, in the reign of the Emperor Basilisc, of the library of Constantinople, containing one hundred and twenty thousand volumes, and among them a copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey, written in golden letters on parchment made from ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... critic: but to that awful character I have not the most distant pretensions. I do not know whether I do not hazard my pretensions to be a critic of any kind, when I say that I think Virgil, in many instances, a servile copier of Homer. If I had the Odyssey by me, I could parallel many passages where Virgil has evidently copied, but by no means improved, Homer. Nor can I think there is anything of this owing to the translators; for, from everything I have seen of Dryden, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... is quite unknown to us; but what does that matter so long as his work itself lives and survives? Like the Comtists he has managed to obtain objective immortality. The work, after all, is for the most part all we ever have to go upon. 'I have my own theory about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey,' said Lewis Carroll (of 'Alice in Wonderland') once in Christ Church common room: 'it is that they weren't really written by Homer, but by another person of the same name.' There you have the Iliad in a nutshell as regards the authenticity of great works. All we know about the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... bodies are the cause of human actions is proper to those who hold that intellect does not differ from sense. Wherefore some of these said that "such is the will of men, as is the day which the father of men and of gods brings on" (Odyssey xviii 135). Since, therefore, it is manifest that intellect and will are not acts of corporeal organs, it is impossible that heavenly bodies be the cause of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... begins to be himself. The battle of the Scamander, the funeral of Patroclus, and the high and solemn close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable with anything of the same kind. The Odyssey is sweet, but there is nothing like this." About this time, prompted by Mrs. Gisborne, he began the study of Spanish, and conceived an ardent admiration for Calderon, whose splendid and supernatural fancy tallied with his own. "I am bathing ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... studied chiefly one author, but that author was Cicero; and never went into the country unaccompanied by some of his works. Fenelon was constantly employed on his Homer; he left a translation of the greater part of the Odyssey, without any design of publication, but merely as an exercise for style. Montesquieu was a constant student of Tacitus, of whom he must be considered a forcible imitator. He has, in the manner of Tacitus, characterised Tacitus: "That historian," he says, "who abridged everything, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... about Jimmy and—" Mifflin was beginning, when the Odyssey of Jimmy Pitt was interrupted by the opening of the door and the ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... did not expect so poetical an interruption; but since the memory of the Odyssey has been thus evoked, I shall ask the Chamber to kindly remember that Ulysses, though disguised as a beggar and loaded with insults, was yet able to string his bow and easily get the better of his enemies. [Violent ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... idea of the importance attached by the women of Asia to this beautiful ornament, and of the extraordinary money value which it sometimes bore: and from the case of the necklace of gold and amber, in the 15th Odyssey, (v. 458,) combined with many other instances of the same kind, there can be no doubt that it was the neighboring land of Phoenicia from which the Hebrew women obtained their necklaces, and ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... forming the young mind of Greece to noble thoughts and bold deeds. To be read in Homer soon became the education of a gentleman; and a rule, recognized in her free age, remained as a tradition even in the times of her degradation. Xenophon introduces to us a youth who knew both Iliad and Odyssey by heart; Dio witnesses that they were some of the first books put into the hands of boys; and Horace decided that they taught the science of life better than Stoic or Academic. Alexander the Great nourished his imagination by the scenes of the Iliad. As time went on, other poets were ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... (after the manner of Plutarch) between Hannibal and Annie Laurie. "2. What internal evidence does the Odyssey afford, that Homer sold his Trojan war-ballads at three yards an obolus? "3. Show the strong presumption there is, that Nox was the god of battles. "4. State reasons for presuming that the practice of lithography may be traced back to the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... 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 said of the Odyssey. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... detailed in the "Odyssey" of Homer, are strangely connected with the Atlantic Ocean. The islands of the Phoenicians were ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... of these, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are believed to have been transmitted from generation to generation, orally, by the minstrels and minnisingers, until the introduction or inception of the Greek alphabet, when they were reduced to parchment, and, surviving all the vicissitudes of time and sequent ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... statesmen of all Italy. Cato himself took a voyage, when he had the concern of an expedition lying upon him, to see and hear Athenodorus; and Scipio sent for Panaetius, when he was commissioned by the senate "to take a survey alike of the habits of men good and bad," ("Odyssey," xvii. 487.) as Posidonius says. Now what a pretty sort of return would it have been in Panaetius to send word back,—"If indeed you were in a private capacity, John a Nokes or John a Stiles, that had a mind to get into some obscure corner or cell, to state ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch |
