"Homeric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is not a bona fide quotation, but a whimsical adaptation of various Homeric verses; the last is a coinage of his own, and means, that he is to have no part, either in the flesh of the victim or in the wine of ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... verses, dramatic phrases and orations of ancient authors, and then to show his superiority of epigrammatic, incisive style, he could paraphrase the poems of other writers into his own divine sentences, using the crude ore of Homeric and Platonic philosophy, resolving their thoughts into the best form of classic English, lucid, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... the conventional epic. Apollonius seems to have carefully studied Homeric glosses, and gives many examples of isolated uses, but his choice of words is by no means limited to Homer. He freely avails himself of Alexandrian words and late uses of Homeric words. Among his contemporaries Apollonius suffers from ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... woodland and the fine frenzy of an Homeric Quixote had wrought the miracle. Of course the soil was good, and had been ruthlessly harrowed and ploughed into the very pink of condition to receive such seed. For months Lyveden's enterprise had been stifled: for months Necessity had kept his intellect ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... Austin Feverel could be so clearly indicated had not the chance bullet of the duel killed the young wife when reconciliation with her husband appeared probable. But a book so vital in spirit, with such lyric interludes, lofty heights of wisdom, homeric humor, dramatic moments and profound emotions, can well afford lapses from perfect form, awkwardnesses of art. There are places where philosophy checks movement or manner obscures thought; but one overlooks all such, remembering ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a man or woman who was like the gods; and who, from that likeness, stood superior to his or her fellow-creatures. Gods, heroes, and men, is a threefold division of rational beings, with which we meet ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... initiation into her mysteries.... She lies on the ground out-of-doors on summer nights, and becomes wet with the dew. She grows young again every spring, yet is of great age, the wrinkled woman of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... harmonious lyre that had sung the loves of Helen and the fall of Troy. Descending the steps of time modern Bohemia finds ancestors at every artistic and literary epoch. In the Middle Ages it perpetuates the Homeric tradition with its minstrels and ballad makers, the children of the gay science, all the melodious vagabonds of Touraine, all the errant songsters who, with the beggar's wallet and the trouvere's harp slung at their backs, ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... Xenophanes criticized him severely for ascribing to the gods acts which, committed by men, would be considered highly disgraceful. We do not hear that any attempt was made to restrain him from thus assailing traditional beliefs and branding Homer as immoral. We must remember that the Homeric poems were never supposed to be the word of God. It has been said that Homer was the Bible of the Greeks. The remark exactly misses the truth. The Greeks fortunately had no Bible, and this fact was both an expression ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... Dante's seeing her in a dream. She is lovely to look upon, and enchants by her sweet singing, but her womb is loathsome. Now, Dante does not call her one of the Sirens carelessly, any more than he speaks of Charybdis carelessly; and though he had got at the meaning of the Homeric fable only through Virgil's obscure tradition of it, the clue he has given us is 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 Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... and German ideas had passed thus over our heads there ensued disgust and mournful silence, followed by a terrible convulsion. For to formulate general ideas is to change saltpetre into powder, and the Homeric brain of the great Goethe had sucked up, as an alembic, all the juice of the forbidden fruit. Those who did not read him, did not believe it, knew nothing of it. Poor creatures! The explosion carried them away like grains of dust into ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... directness and potency of expression, sustained dignity of thought and sentiment and style, the complete presentation of whatever is essential, the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative: indeed for every Homeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement. Here, for example, is something of that choice yet ample suggestiveness—the only true realism because the only perfect ideal of realisation—for which the similitudes ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Mother Nature must have fed color to Healy. He did not paint, play nor write, but the rest of that curse dropped with raw pigment, like a painting of Sorolla. Prisms of English flashed with terrible attraction. It was a Homeric curse of all nations. Parts of it were dainty, too, as a butterfly dip. Cairns was hot and courageous under the spell. The whole train of mules huddled and fell to trembling. A three-legged pariah-dog sniffed, took on a sudden obsession, and went howling heinously dawn the ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... than the Greeks of the Homeric age: something better than the Sandwich or Tonga islanders when they were visited by Captain Cook. Inferior to the former in arts, in polity, and, above all, in their domestic institutions; superior to the latter as having the use of cattle and being under ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... in historical fact. The events, however, are of less importance than the picture of an actual historical, political, and social system, corresponding, not to the supposed date of the Trojan war, but to the date of the composition of the Homeric poems. Later ages regarded the myths themselves with a good deal of scepticism, and were often disposed to rationalise them, or to find for them an allegorical interpretation. The myths of other European peoples have ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Pavilion de Flore, the windows of which looked on the corner of the Pont Royal and on the gate into the Tuileries gardens. From these windows the quaintest sights were to be seen, not the least entertaining of which were the Homeric struggles of the sentries of the National Guard, absolute slaves to their orders, to prevent dogs which were not led by a string from following their owners into the Tuileries gardens, in which struggles the bold city guard, in spite of prodigies ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... to your entire satisfaction, in his own curt way, the problems of the ABSOLUTE and the INFINITE! If the cardinal truths of philosophy and religion hitherto received are doomed to be imperilled by such speculations, one feels strongly inclined to pray with the old Homeric hero,—'that if they must perish, it may be at least in daylight.' We earnestly counsel the youthful reader to defer the study of German philosophy, at least till he has matured and disciplined his mind, and familiarised himself with the best ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... hexameters, in the second of the volumes now before us, that the question of the total inadmissibility of that measure in English verse can be considered as finally settled; the true point not being whether such lines are as good as, or even like, the Homeric or Virgilian models, but whether they are not in themselves a pleasing variety, and on that account alone, if for nothing else, not to be rejected ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... gave one of his well-known roars of laughter—a laugh famous throughout the county, a laugh described by his admirers as "Homeric," by his enemies as "ear-splitting." There was, however, enemies or no enemies, something sympathetic in that laugh, something boyish and ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... even more so. Praising one's self and dispraising an antagonist creates a confidence and a mental superiority in the way of confidence. The vituperative recriminations of modern prize-fighters, the boastings of the Homeric heroes, and the bogan of the old Germans, like the back-talk of the small boy, were calculated to screw the courage up; and the Indians of America usually gave a dance before going on the war-path, in which by pantomime and boasting they magnified ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... The Homeric laugh thus raised having subsided, Mademoiselle Cormon asked the reason of her success. Then began the forte of the gossip. Du Bousquier was depicted as a species of celibate Pere Gigogne, a monster, who for the last fifteen years had kept the Foundling Hospital supplied. ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... society, rough-and-ready men in whom they recognized their natural superiors. These men, rude of speech and of manner, were resourceful, bold, far-seeing. They were conscious of their power. They were laying the foundations of cities and of states and they knew it. They were as boastful as Homeric heroes, and for the same reason. There was in them a rude virility that found expression in word as well ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... had painted her nether parts with so much skill and truth that no one could have wished for anything more beautiful; I was delighted with that portrait; it was a speaking likeness, and I wrote under it, "O-Morphi," not a Homeric word, but a Greek one after all, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... excellence; it is a question of the sense of life. And—oddly enough—it is a question to which the intellect has no answer. The life in each of us takes hold of it and answers it empirically. The normal man is Homeric, though he is not aware of the fact. Especially is the American Homeric; naif, spontaneous, at home with fact, implicitly denying the Beyond. Is he right? This whole continent, the prairies, the mountains and the coast, the trams and trolleys, the sky-scrapers, the factories, elevators, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... divine. Already their earlier predecessors had gone far astray from Homer, of whom they only know by hearsay, relying for their facts on late Latin epitomes, which freely mutilated and perverted the Homeric narrative in favour of the Trojans—the supposed ancestors of half the nations of Europe. Accordingly, Chaucer, in a well-known passage in his "House of Fame," regrets, with sublime coolness, how "one ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... celebrated freethinker, who indulged in bold and independent speculations, and suffered much persecution for his ridicule of the Homeric deities. He flourished at the time of our history and lived to a great age, far on into the fifth century. We have quoted some fragments of his writings above. He committed his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... venture to disturb their repose;[10] and, as the boats of the curious European visitors pass up and down to the sound of music, clouds of wild pigeons rise from each side, and seem sometimes to fill the air above them. Here, according to native legends, repose the Pandavas, the heroes of their great Homeric poem, the Mahabharata, whose names they have transferred to the valley of the Nerbudda. Every fantastic appearance of the rocks, caused by those great convulsions of nature which have so much disturbed the crust of the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... to fill in a picture of which the central figure had passed from the real to the ideal, these things may have been suggestive. So also, perhaps, was the Talmud. The redaction of that chaos began in the second century. But the Vedas, the Homeric poems, the Tripitaka as well, existed in memory long before they were committed to writing. The same is true of the Talmud. Orally it existed prior to the Christ. Considered as literature, if it may be so considered, it is the reverse of endearing. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... It was not very Homeric, when it came off, or very mediaeval, but it was really lots of fun, or far more fun than one would have thought. The storming of the castle was very sincere, and the fortress was honestly defended. Miss Macroyd was made umpire, as she ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Homeric vein, and in something like Homeric language, that Xenophon (to whom we owe the whole narrative of the expedition) describes his dream, or the intervention of Oneirus,[35] sent by Zeus,[36] from which this renovating impulse took its rise. Lying mournful ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with Homeric particularity. When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... "Broad Homeric brows," [Footnote: See Wordsworth, On the Death of James Hogg; Browning, Sordello, By the Fireside; Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh; Principal Shairp, Balliol Scholars; Alfred Noyes, Tales of the Mermeid Inn.] poets invariably possess, but the less phrenological ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... of hideous catcalls." All this I had escaped from, and more. And now what a contrast! Saturdays and Sundays were my own, and I could worship in the Hebrew or Mohammedan temple, just as I chose; and for the rest of the week I should have all day, after four hours' pleasant culling of Horatian and Homeric flowers, to devote to some abstruse study, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... information into account, but he does not. Of the existence of Scott's "first copy" of the ballad in manuscript our critic seems never to have heard; certainly he has not studied the MS. Had he done so he would not assign (on grounds like those of Homeric critics) this verse to Hogg and that to Scott. He would know that Scott did not interpolate a single stanza; that spelling, punctuation, and some slight verbal corrections, with an admirable emendation, were the sum of his industry: that he ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... must be remembered as among the many delightful traits in Darwin's character. Mr. Edmund Yates, in his "Celebrities at Home" (second series), describes his as a laugh to remember, "a rich Homeric laugh, round and full, musical and jocund." "At a droll suggestion of Mr. Huxley's, or a humorous doubt insinuated in the musical tones of the President of the Royal Society (Sir Joseph Hooker), the eyes twinkle under the massive overhanging brows, the Socratic ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... Commercial travellers consider it one of the best towns in England, as it is a sort of metropolis to a great number of thriving villages. Banbury cakes are known wherever English children are bred, and to them, where not educated in too sensible a manner, the Homeric ballad of— ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... tales of Homeric exploit did Mr. Tinkler inculcate a spirit of discipline and respect for authority. But although he had indeed once encountered a Proctor, and at night, he did himself great injustice by this version of the proceedings, which were, as a matter ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... careless, indolent deities. There is nothing conscious that survives death, no soul that can exist apart from the fleshly body.' Such were the doctrines of Epicurus and Lucretius, but to these human nature opposed 'facts'; we see, people said, men long dead in our dreams, or even when awake: the Homeric Achilles, beholding Patroclus in a dream, instantly infers that there verily is a shadow, an eidolon, a shadowy consciousness, shadowy presence, which outlasts the death of the body. To this Epicurus and Lucretius reply, that ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Turks in Turkey, consumes more malt liquor than they drink of all other liquors. The intellectual race that has produced Kant, Goethe and Helmholtz, Bismarck, Moltke, Mommsen, and Richard Wagner in a century, swallows Homeric draughts of beer at breakfast, dinner and supper. That other nations do not follow their example, and laugh at their potations is of little consequence. Even if the Germans do not to some extent owe their national characteristics ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... nature, in wit, or in imagination. It existed from the early ages, and continued to within a brief period of the fall of the empire. With the rich accumulation of ages, the Romans were familiar. They knew nothing indeed of the solitary grandeur of the Jewish muse, or the mythological myths of the Ante-Homeric songsters; but they possessed the Iliad and the Odyssey, with their wonderful truthfulness, and clear portraiture of character, their absence of all affectation, their serenity and cheerfulness, their good sense and healthful sentiments, yet so original that the germ of almost every character ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... of Livingstone's eyes contracted ominously; a lurid flash shot out from under his black, bent brows, and there came on his lip that peculiar smile that we fancy on the face of Homeric heroes—more fell, and cruel, and terrible than even their own frown—just before they leveled the spear. He laid his broad hand, corded across with a net-work of tangled sinews, on the table before him, and the stout oak ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... States for conscripts, and obtained no great number, for the mass of the men had volunteered. The world at large looked on, now and henceforth, with an absorbed regard. The struggle promised to be Homeric, memorable. The South was a fortress beleaguered; seven hundred thousand square miles of territory lost and inland as the steppes of Tartary, for all her ports were blocked by Northern men-of-war. Little news from the fortress escaped; the world had ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Mantuan poet can extol him for little more than the skill with which he has, by making his hero both a traveller and a warrior, united the beauties of the Iliad and the Odyssey in one composition: yet his judgment was perhaps sometimes overborne by his avarice of the Homeric treasures; and, for fear of suffering a sparkling ornament to be lost, he has inserted it where it cannot ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... were writers of verses,[4] yet there is no instance of any attempt to alter or supersede the originals. Nor could any attempt have succeeded. There are specimens which exist, independent of those collected by Macpherson, which present a peculiarity of form, and a Homeric consistency of imagery, distinct from every other species of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... prize-fight, given in detail, by rounds, is followed by an orgy of drunkenness rising to a scale almost Homeric. The man, crazy with alcohol, runs amuck, and things begin to happen. The village is turned upside down. Two powerful contrasts are dramatically introduced, one as an interlude between violent phases of the debauch, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... tradition, but not a tradition itself. It is an unwritten record—as much a record in form and nature as a written document, but differing from a 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 were ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... was worth while to see that even in no great mood, the force of his leadership was recognised and reserve power of the man fully felt. Like every Achilles, Gladstone was held by the heel when dipped. One may well feel that he came short as a theologian. The scholars slight his Homeric disquisitions. Consistency was a virtue which he probably too often scouted, but his high purpose, his spotlessness of spirit, and strong control of men no one can gainsay. In the slang of the street of that time he was the "G.O.M.," the Grand Old Man as well to those ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... not the central warmth, but the flying rippling radiance of the outward-bound light, falling in momentary beauty on the common things about his path. He is a great big man, carelessly dressed, like a Homeric king. I liked everything about him from head to foot, his big carelessly-worn clothes, the bright tie thrust loosely through a cameo ring; his loose shaggy locks, his strong beard. His face, with its delicate pallor, and purely moulded features, had a ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... me a girl did it?" He threw back his head in a roar of Homeric laughter. "Ever hear the beat of that? A damn li'l' Injun squaw playin' her tricks on Bully West! If she was mine I'd tickle her back ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... and allegory.... Hesiod's gods are thus not only the animated parts of the world, but also the other things of nature personified and deified, or abusively called gods and goddesses."[163] The same is true both of the Orphic and Homeric gods. "Their generation of the gods is the same with the generation or creation of the world, both of them having, in all probability, derived it from ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... heavenly motion. Solar and lunar worship was but the recognition in the primitive consciousness of the superior worth-ship of these celestial bodies. As Grote says: "To us these now appear puerile, though pleasing fancies, but to our Homeric Greek they seemed perfectly natural and plausible. In his view, the description of the sun, as given in a modern astronomical treatise, would have appeared not merely absurd, but repulsive and impious." ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... myself have known what it is to carry a brain that never rests in a body that is always tired. I have defied its infirmities, and forced it to do my bidding. You have no such hindrance, if we may judge by your aspect and habits. You deal with horses like a Homeric hero. No wild Indian could handle his bark canoe more dexterously or more vigorously than we have seen you handling yours. There must be some reason for your seclusion which curiosity has not reached, and into which it is not the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... amazing dexterity, in all the evolutions of the dance, he avoided touching the bits of iron; nay, with what intrepidity, at the most critical moment, he held his arms aloft and victoriously snapped his thumbs, it wants a Homeric chronicler to tell. It needs only be said here that, after it, Neil's 'Highland Fling' was a comparative failure, though he, better than most, could give that outflung quiver of the foot which few can properly acquire, and without which the dancer ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... first people who spoke an Aryan language were a tribe of barbarous nomads, who wandered in the highlands of central Asia. Those who have studied the earliest products of Aryan genius in the Vedas, the Zend-Avesta, and the Homeric songs, will be willing to admit that these wandering barbarians may have had minds capable of the highest efforts to which the human intellect is known to have attained. Yet if an irruption of Semitic ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... dramatic power to a wild-wood music of the rarest quality. No moral is drawn, far less any conscious analysis of feeling attempted:—the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the mere presentiment of the situation. Inexperienced critics have often named this, which may be called the Homeric manner, superficial, from its apparent simple facility: but first-rate excellence in it (as shown here, in 196, 156, and 129) is in truth one of the least common triumphs of Poetry.—This style should be compared with what is not ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the perfected forge of Catullus, this unvarying versification, lacking imagination, lacking pity, padded with useless words and refuse, with pegs of identical and anticipated assonances, this ceaseless wretchedness of Homeric epithet which designates nothing whatever and permits nothing to be seen, all this impoverished vocabulary of muffled, lifeless tones bored him ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... One self-contained, Homeric figure, of the remote countryside in which I was born, had the true Spirit of Democracy and shed its light abroad in the Senate of the United States and the Capitol at Albany. He carried the candle of the Lord. It led him to a height of self-forgetfulness achieved by only two others—Washington ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... out of danger, Apollo conveys him to Pergamus to be healed, leaving on the battle-field in his stead a phantom to represent him. Then Apollo challenges Mars to avenge Venus' wound, and the fray which ensues becomes so bloody that "Homeric battle" has been ever since the accepted term for fierce fighting. It is because Mars and Bellona protect Hector that the Trojans now gain some advantage, seeing which, Juno and Minerva hasten to the rescue of the Greeks. Arriving on the battle-field, Juno, assuming the form of Stentor (whose ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... science of geography. Before his time Greek students had concluded that the world was round, instead of flat, as stated in the Homeric poems. By careful measurements he determined its size, within a few thousand miles of its actual circumference, and predicted that one might sail from Spain to the Indies along the same parallel ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... attention to his vociferations, and hurried on as fast as they could to the castle. They were all silent, as they walked through the garden, though Anna Vassilyevna sighed a little. But when they reached the carriages and stood still, they broke into an irrepressible, irresistible fit of Homeric laughter. First Shubin exploded, shrieking as if he were mad, Bersenyev followed with his gurgling guffaw, then Zoya fell into thin tinkling little trills, Anna Vassilyevna too suddenly broke down, Elena could not help smiling, and even Insarov at last could not resist ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... penetration, an almost profound sense of the ridiculous, joyous fooling; above all, that first essential of satire, to be himself amused by what he wrote to amuse others; all these he possessed in a high degree. Rabelais has been called the Homeric buffoon, Lucian is ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... Dickieson (which was like an open secret in the county), and the doom which it was currently supposed they had intended for the others, struck and stirred popular imagination. Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... great genius. It does wonders within its period; it does all except to keep up in the race; it is short-lived. An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I cherish the fancy that Port speaks the sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode. Or put it, that Port is the Homeric hexameter, Burgundy the pindaric ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Ethiopics," "whose writings"—says Huetius—"the subsequent novelists of those ages constantly proposed to themselves as a model for imitation; and as truly may they all be said to have drunk of the waters of this fountain, as all the poets did of the Homeric spring." To so servile an extent, indeed, was this imitation carried, that while both the incidents and characters in the "Clitophon and Leucippe" of Achilles Tatius, a work which, in point of literary merit, stands next to that of Heliodorus, are, in many passages, almost a reproduction, with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... hosts repose under the sun and stars in areas like that of states and kingdoms, and it is its waters that shake the earth at Niagara. Where it receives the Saguenay it is twenty miles wide, and when it debouches into the Gulf it is a hundred. Indeed, it is a chain of Homeric sublimities from beginning to end. The great cataract is a fit sequel to the great lakes; the spirit that is born in vast and tempestuous Superior takes its full glut of power in that fearful chasm. If paradise is hinted ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Gorilla cowered and crouched in simulated defeat and placed his face to tempt the coup de grace which he would see swinging up, and easily dodge, Dam swiftly side-stepped and summoning every ounce of strength, rage, and mad protesting frenzy against the life-long torturing tyrant, he delivered a Homeric blow at the champion's head, beside and behind the ear. (Since he was indestructible by the ordinary point-of-the-chin knock-out, let him make the best of that fearful blow upon the base of the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... this metal, which is the material of a sword found at Amathus, and of numerous arrowheads.[883] We are also told that Cyprus furnished the iron breast-plates worn by Demetrius Poliorcetes;[884] and in pre-Homeric times it was a Phoenician—Cinyras—who gave to Agamemnon his breast-plate of steel, gold, and tin.[885] That more remains of iron arms and implements have not been found on Phoenician sites is probably owing to the rapid oxydisation ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... middle ages, alike "in the realm of the Islamic king of kings and in that of the apostolic servant of servants." So fate made this poetry classical and eminently national. Those characteristics which, in general literature, earn for a work the description "Homeric," in Jewish literature make a liturgical poem "Kaliric," so called from the poet Eliezer Kalir, the subject of many mythical tales, and the first of a long line of poets, Spanish, French, and German, extending to the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The literary ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... and learn how religion and romance are one to those whose manners and ideas are the manners and ideas of the Bible, and how Moses was not at all a crop-eared Puritan, but a gallant warrior!' There is the Homeric element in the religion here, the Prophet is a hero like Achilles, and like him directed by God—Allah instead of Athene. He fights, prays, teaches, makes love, and is truly a man, not an abstraction; and as to wonderful events, instead ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... distinct military organization, a peculiar costume and banner, and its head war-chief (Teuctli), who was its general military commander. They went forth to battle by phratries. The organization of a military force by phratries and by tribes was not unknown to the Homeric Greeks Thus, Nestor advised Agamemnon to "separate the troops by phratries and by tribes, so that phratry may support ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... rallying cries. Even Whig and Tory were scarcely more than imaginary names. The influence now was that of family. The two great divisions of the aristocracy, the old and the new, were in the field. The people were simply spectators. The fight was in the Homeric style. Great champions challenged each other. Achilles Chatham brandished his spear, and flashed his divine armour, against the defenders of the throne, until he became himself the defender. The Ajax, the Diomede, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... by two scholars called Broome and Fenton. His next great poem was the Dunciad,— a satire upon those petty writers, carping critics, and hired defamers who had tried to write down the reputation of Pope's Homeric work. "The composition of the 'Dunciad' revealed to Pope where his true strength lay, in blending personalities with ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... up. It was roasted three hours, and well done, for I tasted it. It is so long since I tasted fresh beef that forgetfulness is possible; but I fancied this to be successful. I tried to imagine that I liked the Homeric repast, and certainly the whole thing has been far more agreeable than was to be expected. The doubt now is, whether I have made a sufficient provision for my household. I should have roughly guessed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... of beet leaves and cream, served with ice. Mickiewicz later repeats this passage in true Homeric ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... Aristotle and Pliny, as well as all the writers on political economy of our own time, and trace the failure of the innumerable efforts to establish some other standard of value, from the oxen that measured the value of the armor of Homeric heroes to the beautifully engraved promise of our day; but this would only be the hundred-times-told tale which every student may find recorded, not only in schoolbooks, but in the writings of Humboldt, Chevalier, Adam Smith, and others of the most advanced scientific authorities. They all ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... we can't grasp it," said the doctor. "What were the scraps of a few Homeric handfuls compared to this? The whole Trojan war might be fought around a Verdun fort and a newspaper correspondent would give it no more than a sentence. I am not in the confidence of the occult powers"—the doctor threw Gertrude a twinkle—"but ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... critic, many an erudite commentator, an army of reviewers. Some were condemned to roll logs up insuperable heights, whence they descended thundering to the plain. Others were set to impositions, and I particularly observed that the Homeric commentators were obliged to write out the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' in their complete shape, and were always driven by fiends to the task when they prayed for the bare charity of being permitted to leave out the 'interpolations.' Others, fearful to narrate, were torn ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... still in their camp, little dreaming of surprise, the maiden rushes on them, conquers and disperses them. Here passes a scene between Johanna and Montgomery, a young Welsh knight, who begs for his life in a truly Homeric manner—pleading his youth, the anguish of his mother, and the sweet bride he had left upon the Severn. It is quite Homeric, professedly and successfully so, and therefore quite out of place. The Welsh knight speaks in a most unknightly strain. And the change ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... pressed down upon the eastern horizon. The green plain of Pharsalus lay spread out far and wide under the strengthening light; the distant hills were peering dimly out from the mist; the acropolis of Pharsalus itself,—perhaps the Homeric Phthia, dwelling of Achilles,—with its two peaked crags, five hundred feet in height, frowned down upon the Caesarian camp. The Enipeus and one or two minor streams were threading their way in silver ribbons down toward the distant Peneus. The fertile plain was green and verdant with the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... argument ready, and etiquette was waived. "Time!" she repeated, and then the two battering-rams, revolving their fists country-fashion, engaged. Half-forgotten Homeric phrases began to flit from a faraway schoolroom back into the little teacher's mind and she began to be consoled for the absence of gloves—those tough old ancients had used gauges of iron and steel. The two boys were evenly matched. After a ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... poor geographer. The crew burst out into loud Homeric laughter. Paganel ran about like a madman, seized his head with both hands and tore his hair. He neither knew what he was doing nor what he wanted to do. He rushed down the poop stairs mechanically and paced the deck, nodding to himself and going straight before without aim ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... to do those shilling table d'hotes is a mystery which I have never solved, though I have visited "below" on one or two occasions and talked with the chefs. There are about a dozen cafes now which, for the Homeric shilling, give you four courses, bread ad lib, and coffee to follow. And it is good; it is a refection for the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... epic in cast and epic in proportion. Although, judged by the Homeric standard, it falls short in many respects of the complete form, yet it may without violence be called an epic. The central figure, Beowulf, a nobly conceived hero, possessing immense strength, unflinching courage, a never-swerving sense of honor, magnanimity, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Warner. "I read his book on the Indians of the Northern Mississippi Valley. Not merely their history and habits, but their legends, their folk lore, and the wonderful poetic glow so rich and fine that he threw over everything. There was something almost Homeric in his description of the great young Wyandot chieftain Timmendiquas or White Lightning, whom he acclaimed as the finest type of savage ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... doubt about the history of "The Thousand and One Nights" as that which veils the origin of the Homeric poems. It is said that a certain Caliph Shahryar, having been deceived by his wife, slew her, and afterwards married a wife only for one day, slaying her on the morning after. When this slaughter of women had continued some time he became wedded to one Shahrazad, daughter of his Vizir, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... day. One boy, on coming late, explained that the cause had been a regular pitched battle between his parents, with the details of which he amused his school-fellows; and he described the battle in vivid and Scottish Homeric terms: "And eh, as they faucht, and they faucht," adding, however, with much complacency, "but my minnie dang, she ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... Mr. Gladstone deals especially with the historic element in Homer, expounding that element, and furnishing by its aid a full account of the Homeric men and the Homeric religion. It starts, after the introductory chapter, with a discussion of the several races then existing in Hellas, including the influence of the Phoenicians and Egyptians. It contains chapters on ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... far from acknowledging any gratitude to the whigs, through whose support emancipation had been carried, he exhausted all the resources of his scurrilous rhetoric upon them, lavishing the epithets "base, brutal, and bloody," with something like Homeric iteration. In December, 1830, Anglesey had returned to succeed the Duke of Northumberland, and Stanley occupied the post of chief secretary, in place of Hardinge. The ministers were privately advised to ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... the pleasantest functions must come to an end. I was loath to part from Mr MacGinnis just when I was beginning, as it were, to do myself justice; but it was unavoidable. In another moment his ally would descend upon us, like some Homeric god swooping from a cloud, and I was not prepared to continue ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... hate any one. The only thing stranger than the fierceness of their quarrels was the suddenness of their conclusion. I remember that at dinner one day they fought a battle over the question of a clean towel with a heat and vigour that was Homeric. A quarter of an hour later I found them quietly talking together. Anna Petrovna was showing Sister K—— a large and hideous photograph ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... increased. It became voluminous. Homeric salvos shook the air. And never one of the fire-eaters upon the steps lived long enough to live down the hateful cry of that day, "HEAD HIM OFF!" which was to become a catch-word on the streets, a ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... chieftains soon became an embattled army, and the brothers-in-law met in arms as hostile commanders on the shores of the northern Blackwater. As one historian has well remarked, there was something positively Homeric about this struggle, in which the two men connected by marriage encountered each other as commanders of opposing armies. Events had been moving on since the marriage between Tyrone and Bagnal's sister. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... his mother Aasta was of the kindest and proudest, and is lovingly described by Snorro. A pretty idyllic, or epic piece, of Norse Homeric type: How Aasta, hearing of her son's advent, set all her maids and menials to work at the top of their speed; despatched a runner to the harvest-field, where her husband Sigurd was, to warn him to come home and ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... inspiration of his author—worshipping his meanest scraps and relics as divine—without one sceptical misgiving of their authenticity, and doubt which was the properest to expound Homer to their countrymen. Reverend Chapman! you have read his hymn to Pan (the Homeric)—why, it is Milton's blank verse clothed with rhyme. Paradise Lost could scarce lose, could it ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Italy. The essential portion, which originally formed the whole interior accommodation of the Latin house, was the -atrium-, that is, the "blackened" chamber, with the household altar, the marriage bed, the table for meals, and the hearth; and precisely similar is the Homeric —megaron—, with its household altar and hearth and smoke-begrimed roof. We cannot say the same of ship-building. The boat with oars was an old common possession of the Indo-Germans; but the advance to the use of sailing ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of one member of the audience if he had acted upon Pococurante's remarks to Candide about the works of Homer. He ought not to have left in so many combats; they were as like one another and as tedious as those in the Iliad, besides being much noisier, at least we are not told that the Homeric heroes were accompanied by a muscular pianist, fully armed, and by the incessant stamping of clogged boots. Nevertheless the majority of the audience enjoyed the fights, for ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... is compounded with another word, the part which is not a proper name begins with a capital if it precedes, but with a small letter if it follows, the hyphen; as "Post-homeric," "Sunday-school." ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... fast-approaching meridian light of philosophic religion. Like the myths of Christianity, it had grown up in an age of superstition, when men, blind to the wondrous order of the universe, believed that supernatural beings, like the Homeric gods, actually interfered in the affairs of mortals. Science had revealed the irrevocability of the laws of nature—was man alone to be exempt from them? No. The time would come when it would be as obsolete an absurdity ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... coarseness with a total lack of Zola's genius, insight, purpose, or philosophy. But when he comes to speak of a Thackeray or a Scott, his attitude is one that, to put it in the most complimentary form that I can think of, reminds us strongly of Homeric drowsiness. The virtue of James is one thing and the virtue of Scott is another; but surely admiration for both does not make too unreasonable a demand on catholicity of palate? Mr. Howells could never write himself down an ass, but surely in his criticism ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... so divine!—the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, "hyacinthine!" I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose—and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... one favourite to another. (25) Caesar performed the solemn rites of the great Latin festival on the Alban Mount during his Dictatorship. (Compare Book VII., line 471.) (26) Dyrrhachium was founded by the Corcyreams, with whom the Homeric Phaeacians have been identified. (27) Apparently making the Danube discharge into the Sea of Azov. See Mr. Heitland's Introduction, p. 53. (28) At the foot of the Acroceraunian range. (29) Caesar himself says nothing of this adventure. But it is mentioned by ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... excess, that his style was his slave. Hence that energy of epithet, so concise and telling, that a foreigner is tempted to explain it by some special richness or aptitude in the dialect he wrote. Hence that Homeric justice and completeness of description which gives us the very physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature is. Hence, too, the unbroken literary quality of his best pieces, which keeps him from ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the people are loyal to their country and lovingly call it "The Maid of the North." They lead pastoral lives and their customs are much like those of the Homeric age. Story-telling is much appreciated by all classes. There are wandering minstrels who gain their livelihood by going from house to house to recite the stories in prose and poetry which they have learned by heart. Spindle and distaff are used in spinning the wool into yarn, which is ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... Front Street, Baltimore, is claimed as the birthplace of Poe. There is a house in Norfolk that is likewise so distinguished. There are other places, misty with passing generations, similarly known to history. Poe, though not Homeric in his literary methods, had much the same post-mortem experience as the ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... he included part of what we now know as Africa. From the fragments scholars have been able to reproduce the rough outlines of the map of the world as it presented itself to Hecataeus. From this it can be seen that the Homeric conception of the surrounding ocean formed a chief determining feature in Hecataeus's map. For the rest, he was acquainted with the Mediterranean, Red, and Black Seas, and with the great rivers Danube, Nile, ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... above; it was good to be within doors, and to dry one's coat by the peat embers. We insisted on our hostess partaking of supper, which we served up to her in bed; then Sandie and I, the girl and the man, set ourselves down by the table and stretched forth our hands, in the Homeric phrase, 'to the ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... a proud thing to remember that the delineation of the Fogie has employed the genius of the greatest poets. The character of Nestor in the Iliad must be regarded as one of the masterpieces of the Homeric gallery. The eloquent drivel that distils from his tongue, the length and general inapplicability of his narratives, the judicious and imposing triteness of his counsels, the vigorous imbecility of his exhortations—all reveal the heroic Fogie ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada we may find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the Homeric figure that once dominated the plains. In what we say as to his trade, therefore, or his fashion in the practice of it, we speak in terms of thirty or forty years ago, when wire was unknown, when the round-up still was necessary, and the cowboy's ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... by, counting the cattle to see that none had been overlooked in the night. The Aberdeen-Angus still held his place in the front, and the big muley bull marched by like a king's governor, keeping his space of clear road at the peril of a Homeric struggle. ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... invitation to work, shovels were made fast along the coamings of the hatch. The six men took these, and with shouts dropped down upon the grain. And then began a period of Homeric toil. The fireman and the coal-trimmer set the pace, and with a fine contempt for the unhandiness of amateurs did not fail to give a display of their utmost. Kettle and Dayton-Philipps gamely kept level with them. The Italian ganger ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... that they do not agree. How can they tell the same things in the same way, since the sources of each are so different? Nor, with only myths for warp and woof, is it at all surprising that we have nothing more than Homeric exaggerations when the fanciful fabric ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... and is also seen in the Sikkim temples and throughout Tibet. Ermann, in his Siberian Travels, mentions it as occurring in the Khampa Lama's temple at Maimao chin; he conjectures it to have been the Cyclops of the Greeks, which according to the Homeric myth had a mark on the forehead, instead of an eye. The glory surrounding the heads of Tibetan deities is also alluded to by Ermann, who recognises in it the Nimbus of the ancients, used to protect the heads of statues from the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... stray copy of Mr. Pope's ingenious translation of the ILIAD. He now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem—having thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words—in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that night the Homeric demigods again walked the earth. Trojan bully and wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the canyon seemed to bow to the wrath of the son of Peleus. Mr. Oakhurst listened with quiet satisfaction. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... to give a history of the weapon calls to mind many similar passages in the Homeric poems. The particular story in mind here is the escape of Theodoric from the giants. He loses his way and falls into the hands of one of the twelve giants who guard Duke Nitger. He gains the favor of Nitger's ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... the Assyrians, to the Semitic or Syro-Arabian family, comprising, besides, the Syrians, Jews, Arabians, and in part the Abyssinians. They were at a very early period a trading and mercantile nation, and the variegated robes and golden ornaments fabricated at Sidon were prized by the Homeric heroes. They habitually traversed the AEgean Sea, and formed settlements ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... it; they are capital, and you are a regular genius, as we all agree," cut in the Homeric Miss Cutter. ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... primitive and Homeric truce the week passed by; it consisted almost entirely of eating, drinking, smoking, talking, and occasionally singing. They wrote their records and cast loose their bottle. They never ascended to the ominous plateau; they ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... his mouth, but collapsed in a fit of retching, as from right and left, and from the darkness all around him, a roar of Homeric laughter woke the echoes of the Cove. Men rolled about laughing. Men leaned against one ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it the Homeric kabab, and claimed that it had been handed down from the days of the old Grecian writer and philosopher; which, if true, proved that Homer knew a delicious thing when he ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... been studied in the Homeric poems. Mediaeval private life has been reconstructed principally from the chansons de gestes. (See C. V. Langlois, Les Traditions sur l'histoire de la societe francaise au moyen age d'apres les sources litteraires, in ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... Neither in the Georgics nor elsewhere has he the merit of striking originality; his chief excellence consists in the skillful handling of borrowed materials. The AEneid, or adventures of AEneas after the fall of Troy, is an epic formed on the model of the Homeric poems. It was founded upon an old Roman tradition that AEneas and his Trojans settled in Italy, and were the founders of the Roman name. In the first six books the adventures of Ulysses in the Odyssey are the ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... head. This frontal eye is totally wanting in the other workers, and is not known in any other kind of ant. The apparition of these strange creatures from the cavernous depths of the mine reminded me, when I first observed them, of the Cyclopes of Homeric fable. They were not very pugnacious, as I feared they would be, and I had no difficulty in securing a few with my fingers. I never saw them under any other circumstances than those here related, and what their special functions may be I ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... that he would have thought it equally sensible if she had spoken, like Hans Andersen, of the tragedies of a toy-shop or the Homeric passions ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... half a day in terror of what he called "the inevitable reaction," unaware of the fact that certain people do not suffer from reactions and too engrossed in mineralogy to have learnt, from a study of other sciences, that Angelina was one of them. She had passed that stage, with Homeric laughter, long before his appearance on Nepenthe. She ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... strike Mr. Elkins as the best practical joke he had ever heard of; and Cornish suggested that for a man to stop in Homeric laughter on Broadway might be pleasant for him, but was embarrassing to his companions. By this time Cornish himself was better-natured. Jim took charge of our movements, and commanded us to a dinner with him, in the nature of a celebration, with a ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Dwight, sublime in epic strain"; "Blest Dwight"; Dwight of "Homeric fire." Colonel Humphreys is fully up ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... explanation he found in his theory that all the accounts of pigmy tribes were based upon the mistakes of travellers who had taken apes for men. Nor was he without followers in his opinion; amongst whom here need only be mentioned Buffon, who in his Histoire des Oiseaux explains the Homeric tale much as Tyson had done. The discoveries, however, of this century have, as all know, re-established in their essential details the accounts of the older writers, and in doing so have demolished the theories of Tyson and Buffon. We now know, not merely that there are ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... represent noble actions, and those of noble personages; and the meaner sort the actions of the ignoble. The latter class produced invectives at first, just as others did hymns and panegyrics. We know of no such poem by any of the pre-Homeric poets, though there were probably many such writers among them; instances, however, may be found from Homer downwards, e.g. his Margites, and the similar poems of others. In this poetry of invective its natural fitness ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... thread with their fine beards—and, judging from mural sculptures, curling tongs must have been in considerable demand with them. In ancient Greece the beard was universally worn, and it is related of Zoilus, the founder of the anti-Homeric school, that he shaved the crown of his head, in order that all the virtue should go to the nourishment of his beard. Persius could not think of a more complimentary epithet to apply to Socrates than that of "Magistrum Barbatum," or Bearded Master—the notion being that the beard was ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... and Mr Guest, he has chosen to adhere to the Homeric names of the deities, in place of adopting the Latin forms; and in this matter he has little doubt that every scholar will approve his choice. Mr Archdeacon Williams has commonly followed the same plan in those very spirited prose translations ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... no end to his affection for him. Rinaldo and other Paladins, meantime, cannot rest till they have set out in search of Orlando. They never meet or part with him without manifesting a tenderness proportionate to their valour,—the old Homeric candour of emotion. The devil Ashtaroth himself, who is a great and proud devil, assures Rinaldo, for whom he has conceived a regard, that there is good feeling (gentilezza) even in hell; and Rinaldo, not to hurt the feeling, answers that he has no doubt ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... moment she had got her "second wind," and as he tried to get her up she gave such a yell that he dropped her again, and bolted, stopping his ears; bolted over a teakettle which had been thrown down, and fell prostrate, resounding like an Homeric hero, on to a heap of kitchen utensils, at the feet of Alice, who had come in to come see ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... knowledge, indeed, such as lies beyond the bounds of actual experience, was extremely limited, but when life was singularly fresh, vivid, and expansive. The only poems of Homer we possess are the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," for the Homeric hymns and other productions lose all title to stand in line with these wonderful works, by reason of conflict in a multitude of particulars with the witness of the text, as well as of their poetical inferiority. They evidently belong to the period that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne |
