"Homeric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 head, as Professor Tyndall ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... by sheer modesty of the honor of being President of the United States. His is one of the truly Homeric figures in American history. By downright purity of motive, transparency of purpose, and the devotion of commanding powers to the public good, he won for himself the honor, the love and the unbounded confidence of all his ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... different history is that of Zeus among the Greeks—Zeus, Father of Gods and Men, the ideal of kingly majesty and wisdom and goodness. The reason is patent. Ages and ages before the days when the Homeric poets sang, the Greeks had forgotten that Zeus originally meant "sky": it had become to them a personal name of a great spiritual power, which they were free to invest with the noblest ideal of personality. ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... fasting, and indifferent as to what he ate. The real was almost effeminate in movement, though not in figure; he had the Greek features, but his blue eyes had a cold, weary expression in them. He was dainty in eating, and had anything but a Homeric appetite. However, Molly's hero was not to eat more than Ivanhoe, when he was Friar Tuck's guest;' and, after all, with a little alteration, she began to think Mr. Osborne Hamley might turn out a poetical, ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... another difficulty: justice, like the art of war or any other art, must be of opposites, good at attack as well as at defence, at stealing as well as at guarding. But then justice is a thief, though a hero notwithstanding, like Autolycus, the Homeric hero, who was 'excellent above all men in theft and perjury'—to such a pass have you and Homer and Simonides brought us; though I do not forget that the thieving must be for the good of friends and the harm of enemies. And still there arises another question: Are friends to be interpreted as real ...
— The Republic • Plato
... up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips the first dog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric phrase, he makes a brief sort of amende,[101-1] and is off. The boys, with Bob and me at their head, are after him; down Niddry street he goes, bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow—Bob and I, and our ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... now), is of the most meagre character, and usually most difficult to interpret. Thus the Roman religion stands alone among the religions of ancient civilisations in that we are almost entirely without surviving texts of its forms of prayer, of its hymns or its legends;[11] even in Greece the Homeric poems, with all the earliest Greek literature and art, make up to some extent for the want of that documentary evidence which throws a flood of light on the religions of Babylon, Egypt, the Hindus, and the Jewish people. We know in fact as little about the religion ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... 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 ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 Dion, Appian and Plutarch ("Caesar", ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... 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 who fought him as ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... 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
... in modern languages. I have read of a man who, being by his ignorance of Greek compelled to gratify his curiosity with the Latin printed on the opposite page, declared that from the rude simplicity of the lines literally rendered he formed nobler ideas of the Homeric majesty than from the laboured elegance of polished versions. Those literal translations were always at hand, and from them he could easily obtain his author's sense with sufficient certainty and among the readers of Homer ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... descriptions is concealed by the use of what are grammatically proper names in a way which really transforms them into descriptions. It is, for example, a legitimate question whether Homer existed; but here "Homer" means "the author of the Homeric poems," and is a description. Similarly we may ask whether God exists; but then "God" means "the Supreme Being" or "the ens realissimum" or whatever other description we may prefer. If "God" were a proper name, God would have to be ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, has some admirable Homeric qualities—out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the expressions in that poem ... come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... that, "when we forbear to praise ourselves, we make a sacrifice to the pride or to the envy of others." Paine did not hesitate to mortify both these failings in his fellow-men. He praises himself with the simplicity of an Homeric hero before a fight. He introduces himself, without a misgiving, almost in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... the food," answered the girl quickly. "I was thinking of the toil, the hardship—the Homeric labours of those who face ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... adherents of the communal origin theory. Another critical idea which originated in Germany, and in which Scott had no interest, though he knew something about it, was the Wolffian hypothesis in regard to the Homeric poems. He once heard Coleridge expound the subject, but failed to join in the discussion. (Journal, Vol. II, p. 164; Lockhart, Vol. V, p. 193.) He said the theory could never be held by any poet. See a note by Lockhart ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... the literary emotion in the sense of drama or narrative, whereas in the instances of Ryder or Fuller they built up expression entirely from literary experience. Albert Ryder achieves most by reason of his vaster poetic sensibility—his Homeric instincts for the drama and by a very original power for arabesque. He is alone among the Americans in his unique gift for pattern. We can claim Albert Ryder as our most original painter as Poe takes his place as our most original poet who ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... writing either in Sleswick or in Britain. The minstrels who composed them taught them by word of mouth to their pupils, and so handed them down from generation to generation, much as the Achaean rhapsodists handed down the Homeric poems. Nevertheless, two or three such old songs were afterwards written out in Christian Northumbria or Wessex; and though their heathendom has been greatly toned down by the transcribers, enough remains to give us a graphic glimpse ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... hand upon the helm of the mailed knight, and would deflower it of its glory and glossy plumes. It is hard to yield up prejudices and preconceptions, however false; and the writer himself in doing so confesses to the cost of a struggle of no ordinary violence. It was hard to give up the Homeric illusion, and believe that Greeks were men, not demigods—hard to recognise in the organ-man and the opera-singer the descendants of those heroes portrayed in the poetic pictures of a Virgil; and yet in the days of my dreamy youth, when I turned my face to the West, I did so under the full ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... the combatants appear in the arena, sometimes as many as a hundred on a side, and the tournament begins, as in Homeric times, with taunts and abuse, which presently end in skirmishes between the boys who have come to look on. Scouts are placed at distant points to cry 'Fire' at the approach of the dreaded Bargello and his men, who are the only representatives of order in the city and not, indeed, anxious to face ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... chosen and elaborately fortified defences, the proudest of Germany's supermen of war had been beaten at their own game by the civilian soldiers of "effete and luxury loving Britain," and the republican armies of "decadent France," and still the Homeric fight was raging. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the Hun was fighting to hold the line which should make good his insolent claim to the hegemony of the world. Step by step, yard by yard, that line was being torn from his bloody fingers. Into that sea of fire and blood, the Canadians were to plunge. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... take an interest, for or against, in his fate. The whole story becomes familiar, and, if one may say so, comfortable, by the fact that it is conducted under the control and direction of the gods. Listen, for example, to the Homeric account of the onset of a storm, and observe how it sets one ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... is no saying how the deadly combat might have ended, had not a lamp been broken overhead, the oil of which drenched both the warriors. This intervention of the superior gods was just as successful as a Homeric cloud; the fray ceased; Goldsmith and his friend withdrew; and ultimately an action for assault was compromised by Goldsmith's paying fifty pounds to a charity. Then the howl of the journals arose. Their prerogative had been assailed. "Attacks ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... it from Fort Smith to the Big Timbers, and was expected to push it before him to the edge of the Pacific Ocean! It was evident that Patrick was tired of his task: for they had not made much progress in their Homeric supper, before he once more ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Roncesvalles, we are rather moved to smile at the violence of their emotion than to weep over the dead, so little power has the poet to touch the springs of feeling. However, there are passages in which the poem rises to sublimity, and which have been pronounced Homeric by ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... His Homeric laughter must have shattered the Trunk Telephone system of Great Britain, for after that there was silence cold and merciless. Well, perhaps it was just as well, for if we had been allowed to converse further I might have told him ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... stung by personal injuries; and it is only with his own arm that he strikes. His exploits have a mixture of grim humour and fierce hatred quite unlike anything else in Scripture, and more resembling the horse-play of Homeric or Norse heroes than the stern purpose and righteous wrath of a soldier who felt that he was God's instrument. We seem to hear his loud laughter as he ties the firebrands to the struggling jackals, or swings the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... mentions an "Isle of Apes" in the Sea of China and Al-Idrisi places it two days' sail from Sukutra (Dwipa Sukhatra, Socotra). It is a popular error to explain the Homeric and Herodotean legend of the Pygmies by anthropoid apes. The Pygmy fable (Pygmaei Spithamai1 cubit3 spans) was, as usual, based upon fact, as the explorations of late years have proved: the dwarfs are homunculi of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the Arab, was rending away its provinces. At last the spoilers encountered one another, each striving for the full mastery of the prey. Their conflict brought back upon the memory of Gibbon the old Homeric simile, where the strife of Hector and Patroclus over the dead body of Cebriones is compared to the combat of two lions, that in their hate and hunger fight together on the mountain tops over the carcass of a slaughtered stag; and the reluctant yielding ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... philosophy and freedom are essentials to human happiness; in the lands which Aphrodite rose from the waves to govern, as the Seasons, hand in hand, stood to welcome her on the shores, Nature is all sufficient. (Homeric Hymn.) ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of view. But here is no refining, no affectation of pastoral simplicity. The Cossacks is distinctly a primitive poem, one which can scarcely be classed either as idyl or epic, though, in spite of its scenes being mainly rural, it perhaps approaches more nearly to the epic. There is an Homeric simplicity in its descriptions of half-drunken warriors with their superb physique, their bravado, their native dignity and singleness of character. Marianka, the beautiful heroine, passes from one picture to another in her quiet, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... a Homeric narration of his hog-raising experience. In spite of herself the content of his talk interested her. And as for the effect upon her of his singular enthusiasm, it was deep and compelling. The little-boned Berkshire razorback ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... is as much 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... for the attack; the "heavy chariots" were heavier, and designed for purposes of defense. Li Ch'uan, it is true, says that the latter were light, but this seems hardly probable. It is interesting to note the analogies between early Chinese warfare and that of the Homeric Greeks. In each case, the war- chariot was the important factor, forming as it did the nucleus round which was grouped a certain number of foot-soldiers. With regard to the numbers given here, we are informed that each ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... fight. Whether snow is less plentiful, or students are too cultured and too refined for these rough pastimes it is impossible to say, but certain it is that a really great snowball fight is also a thing of the past. In those days they were Homeric combats, and a source of keen enjoyment to Robert Louis Stevenson, a very funny account of whom, on one of these occasions, was given me at the time by his cousin, Lewis Balfour, from Leven, himself a jovial medical student ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... they are of the same type. I'm anxious to see what Percival Benson thinks of Olga when he gets back—they would be such opposites. Olga is working with her ox-team on the land. Two days ago I rode out on Paddy and watched her. There was something Homeric about it, something Sorolla would have jumped at. She seemed so like her oxen. She moved like them, and her eyes were like theirs. She has the same strength and solemnity when she walks. She's so primitive and natural and instinctive in her actions. Yesterday, after dinner, ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... dense treetops were faintly stirring in the starlight. My companion dilated upon the pluck and muscle, the latent pugnacity, of his dear little son, and told me how bravely already he doubled his infant fist. There was a kind of Homeric simplicity about it. From this he proceeded to wider considerations, and observed that the English child was of necessity the bravest and sturdiest in the world, for the plain reason that he was the germ of the English man. What the English ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... one idea, the intelligence of animals. He began by undertaking the education of a horse that gave him no very definite results. But, in 1900, he became the owner of a Russian stallion who, under the name of Hans, to which was soon added the Homeric and well-earned prefix of Kluge, or Clever, was destined to upset all our notions of animal psychology and to raise questions that rank among the most unexpected and the most absorbing problems which man has ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... by the Greeks in word, in symbol, and in religious service, of this faith, are so many and so beautiful, that I hope some day to gather at least a few of them into a separate body of evidence respecting the power of Athena, and of its relations to the ethical conception of the Homeric poems, or, rather, to their ethical nature; for they are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in their essence, as all good art is. There is an increasing insensibility to this character, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred and fifty years after the event. That the single authorship of the Homeric poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost prehistoric. But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of his death the first English colony in {109} America was already nine years old. The ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... throne stood the men of higher degree, all alike to join the King in his judgment, like the Homeric warriors of old, as indeed Sidonius had often said that there was no better comment on the ILIAD than the meetings of ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... through the tall mustard, managed to take up an enfilading position as the Harrisons advanced to break in the door. A threatening shout from the ambuscaded partisans caused them to hurriedly fall back towards the rear of the barn. There was a pause, and then began the usual Homeric chaff,—with this Western difference that it was cunningly intended to draw the ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... of rubbish rests on the rock itself, and may very well have belonged to the town built by Dardanus, of which Tlepolemus relates the destruction by his grandfather Hercules.[250] According to the Homeric story six generations, and according to generally accepted modern calculations two centuries, separate Dardanus from Priam. If therefore we accept 1200 B.C. as the date of the Trojan war, the town built by Dardanus would date from 1400 B.C., ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... its encumbering clay Or lightens it to spirit, whatsoe'er The form which their creations may essay, Are bards; the kindled Marble's bust may wear More poesy upon its speaking brow Than aught less than the Homeric page may bear; One noble stroke with a whole life may glow, Or deify the canvass till it shine With beauty so surpassing all below, 30 That they who kneel to Idols so divine Break no commandment, for high Heaven is there Transfused, transfigurated:[318] and the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... jest has your Excellency in hand?" asked the Rev. Mather Byles, whose Presbyterian scruples had not kept him from the entertainment. "Trust me, sir, I have already laughed more than beseems my cloth at your Homeric confabulation with yonder ragamuffin General of the rebels. One other such fit of merriment, and I must throw off my clerical ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... suspense that is unusual, and is a series of surprises with one grand surprise to the robbers at their feast as its climax. The Donkey is a noble hero who breathes a spirit of courage like that of the fine Homeric heroes. His achievement of a home is a mastery that pleases children. And the message of the tale, which after all, is its chief worth—that there ought to be room in the world for the aged and the worn out, and that "The guilty flee when no man pursueth"—appeals to their compassion ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... that Homeric war, How Troy was sieged like Londonderry town; And stout Achilles, at his jaunting-car, Dragged mighty Hector with a bloody crown; And eke the bard, that sung of their renown, In garb of Greece, most ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the performance was in full swing. Young Master Waffles, who had devoted considerable study to his subject, had conceived the combat of his imaginary cats in a broad, almost Homeric, vein. The unpleasantness opened with a low gurgling sound, answered by another a shade louder and possibly more querulous. A momentary silence was followed by a long-drawn note, like rising wind, cut off abruptly and succeeded by a grumbling mutter. The response ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... The Homeric poems show man in his first full awaking to beauty and to music. They show more. The fashioning of the supernal world in man's mind varies with people and with time. Here it is Zeus and Hades, again ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... 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 the ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... hours, according to the Homeric idea, were the goddesses of the seasons, the course of which was symbolically represented by "the dance of the Hours." They were often described, in connection with the Graces, Hebe, and Aphrodite, ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... definite information as to the present position of affairs at Tewa, before setting out for it in a body. Max, yesterday, finished his miniature ship, and exhorted me to "wind up" our history forthwith, with a Homeric description of the great battle at the islet, and our heroic defence of the banyan tree. He declares it to be his intention to enclose the manuscript in the hold of the vessel and launch her when half-way to Tewa, in the assured ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... 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 or Turanian conquerors had swept that infant tribe ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... country, when anyone sneezes, people say 'Good luck to you,' the student cannot say a priori what country you refer to, what race you have in your thoughts. It may be Florida, as Florida was when first discovered; it may be Zululand, or West Africa, or ancient Rome, or Homeric Greece, or Palestine. In all these, and many other regions, the sneeze was welcomed as an auspicious omen. The little superstition is as widely distributed as the flint arrow-heads. Just as the object and use of the arrow-heads became intelligible when we found similar weapons ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... farewell address is described as one of the most affecting ever spoken in the Senate. Describing the scene to his daughter, Burr said that tears flowed abundantly, but Burr must have described what he wished to see. American politicians are not Homeric heroes, who weep on slight provocation; and any inclination to pity Burr must have been inhibited by the knowledge that he had made himself the rallying-point of every dubious intrigue at ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... to find literary men up there, and began to hope there might be some corner for his own historical works. So he caps him with another Homeric verse, explaining that he ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca
... One other Homeric fight with the machine was Roosevelt's portion during his Governorship. This time it was not directly with the boss himself but with the boss's liegemen in the Legislature. But the kernel of the whole matter was the same—the selfish interests of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... one, however, has yet equalled old Chapman—certainly not Pope nor Cowper. The most successful translation into a modern language is unquestionably the German one by Voss. Mure and Grote have written the ablest dissertations in English upon the Homeric controversy, but they are not poets, and could not if they would translate ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... himself; the other half was written 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 ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... proverbial for its wealth of gold in all antiquity, down to the Middle Ages. "Arabia sends us gold," said Thomas A. Becket. Sacred ornaments of gold abound in churches, temples, pagodas, and tombs, throughout the Eastern hemisphere. The Homeric poems call Mycenae a city rich in gold. Gold abounded in the Levant, and it was obtained in considerable quantity in the island of Siphnos, and also from Pangaeus. It was found in abundance in Turdeltania in Spain; it was brought ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... 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 ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... that is likely to be comforting. What history they did know could bring them little comfort. In the first place it showed them a series of great civilizations, rising and falling, and those that had fallen seemed at least as good as those that followed them. A Greek like Plato knew of the Homeric civilization, simpler indeed, but fresher and purer than his own. And he believed, what we now know to be the fact, that even before the Homeric there had been a wonderful island-culture, what we call the Minoan, flourishing ...
— Progress and History • Various
... deserve mention. The "Fight at Finnsburgh" is a fragment of fifty lines, discovered on the inside of a piece of parchment drawn over the wooden covers of a book of homilies. It is a magnificent war song, describing with Homeric power the defense of a hall by Hnaef[19] with sixty warriors, against the attack of Finn and his army. At midnight, when Hnaef and his men are sleeping, they are surrounded by an army rushing in with fire and sword. Hnaef springs to his feet at the first alarm and wakens his warriors ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... because one sweet mellifluous word expresses it in Homer);—excepting this, it has no look, no air, of a translation. It is as truly an original poem as the 'Faery Queene';—it will give you small idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or Cowper's cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet,—as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of its frequent and perverse quaintnesses ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... to us of Hellenic gastronomy is associated with cannibalism. It is the story of Pelops—an episode almost pre-Homeric, where a certain rudimentary knowledge of dressing flesh, and even of disguising its real nature, is implied in the tale, as it descends to us; and the next in order of times is perhaps the familiar passage in the Odyssey, recounting the adventures of Odysseus and his companions ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... out a new path. The story of his intimacy with Herodotus is probably due to the fact that he imitated him and had recourse to his history for the incidents of his poem. The Perseis was at first highly successful and was said to have been read, together with the Homeric poems, at the Panathenaea, but later critics reversed this favourable judgment. Aristotle (Topica, viii. 1) calls Choerilus's comparisons far-fetched and obscure, and the Alexandrians displaced him by Antimachus in the canon of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... time when 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... shepherd-kings. The faycan, or high priest, also exercised the right of conferring nobility; and the law of the Guanches expressed that every achimencey who degraded himself by milking a goat with his own hands, lost his claim to nobility. This law does not remind us of the simplicity of the Homeric age. We are astonished to see the useful labours of agriculture, and of pastoral life, exposed to contempt at the very ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... impossible there may have been a little touch of gratified malice in that Homeric laugh which killed Kenealy's parliamentary career, but there was certainly not a trace of it in that heroic peal of mirth which dismissed Mr Newdigate from the scene of his parliamentary activities. Mr Newdigate was undoubtedly ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... christened by the troops who camp in a great forest which shadows the whole position. It is a point at which the new German plan of thrusting toward the railway instead of as hitherto toward the road has produced fighting of more than Homeric quality. ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... This Homeric dialogue between the chief combatants was stopped by Dubuisson, who saw that it distracted the attention of the warriors, and so enabled the besieged to run to the adjacent river for water. The firing was resumed more fiercely than ever. Before night twelve ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... three classes: political, theological, and literary—the last including, and indeed chiefly consisting of, his books and articles upon Homer and the Homeric question. All the political writings, except his books on "The State in its Relations to the Church" and "Church Principles Considered in their Results," belong to the class of occasional literature, being pamphlets or articles produced ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... war are next considered—that of sacking a town taken by assault, and of blockading a town defended, not by the inhabitants, but by a military garrison—are next examined;—in both these cases the penalty falls upon the innocent. The Homeric description of a town taken by assault, is still applicable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... 'Phoenician Women' of his predecessor Phrynichus, which dealt with the same theme. Aeschylus, indeed, is said to have imitated it closely in the 'Persians.' Plagiarism was thought to be a venial fault by the ancients, just as in the Homeric times piracy was not considered a disgrace. The scene of the play is not Athens, as one might expect, but Susa. It opens without set prologue. The Chorus consists of Persian elders, to whom the government of the country has been committed in the absence of the King. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the antithesis of the "cloudy and lightning" Standish O'Grady, whose temperament, equally Gaelic, is that of the fighting bard, delighting in battle, fierce, fuliginous, aristocratic, pagan, with the roll of Homeric hexameters in his martial style. If O'Grady recalls the Oisin who contended with Patrick and longed to be slaying with the Fianna, even though they were in hell, Leamy, anima naturaliter Christiana, reminds ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... and costumed themselves in scenery as he wrote them, I venture to affirm that none can so read them without the conviction that their author is a true poet. In the first place, the general conception of his chief operas, taken together, is in the largest sense poetic, and I might even say Homeric. This man has transmitted an entire religion to poetry, and then set it to music. And it is one of the greatest of religions,—what Nature engraved on the heart of our own Teutonic ancestors. It is all there,—its thousand phantasmal years, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... daring-do.' There were giants in those days—men of varied renown— and they arose and won for themselves in strange fields of fame, record and place. Each became in his day a hero of the Iliad or Odyssey of Oxford life—a kind of Homeric man." ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... alike, both printed with the Macpherson plaid. One was his, the other mine, which he had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own, thrusting it into his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from the same workshop. In memory of which event we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric heroes. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... From Homeric warfare to subterranean conflict of modern trenches is a far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of this grim "revue" lacks something of the patience of its creator, and ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... Medwin, or the Gisbornes, he was simply happy; and nothing could be further from the truth than to paint him as habitually sunk in gloom. On the contrary, we hear quite as much about his high spirits, his "Homeric laughter," his playfulness with children, his readiness to join in the amusements of his chosen circle, and his incomparable conversation, as we do about his solitary broodings, and the seasons when pain or bitter memories over-cast his heaven. Byron, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... comparative method of inquiry, the more brilliant is the light thrown upon that brief day of Athenian greatness, and the more wonderful and admirable does it all seem. To see this glorious community overthrown, shorn of half its virtue (to use the Homeric phrase), and thrust down into an inferior position in the world, is a mournful spectacle indeed. And the book which sets before us, so impartially yet so eloquently, the innumerable petty misunderstandings and contemptible ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... have been turned into farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's plan. 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 ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... as wholly irrevocable; and—for one of her graces—she had the feminine expectation that, if only events can be sufficiently postponed, something will intervene; which is perhaps a heritage of the gentlest women descended from Homeric days. If the island was so historic, little Olivia may have said, where was the interfering goddess? She looked unseeingly toward St. George and toward her father, and the sense of the bitter actuality of the choice suddenly ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Land's End by Diodorus, the Greek historical compiler. He describes the natives as hospitable and civilized. They mined tin, which was bought by traders and carried through Gaul to the south-east, and may, as suggested here, have been used in their armour by the warriors during the Homeric Siege of Troy. ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... wall—when, as a result of his struggles, a section of the down-pipe came away in his hand, so that he was left clinging to the gutter with one foot in the air and twelve feet of piping swaying in his arms—then our control gave way and we let ourselves run before a tempest of Homeric laughter. We clasped one another; we leaned against walls; we stamped upon the ground; we fought for breath; tears streamed from our eyes. All the time, in a loud militant voice, Berry spoke of building and architects and mountain goats, of France and of the French, of incitement to suicide, of inquests ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... reciters of this elder poetry 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... is justly applauded by the New York Press as a masterpiece of astuteness. He appears to be the only one of the party who has an eye for the dark. She fancies she may know a more widely awake in the abstract. But now, thanks to jubilant Journals and Homeric laughter over the Continent, the secret is out, in so far as the concurrents are all unmasked and exposed for the edification of the American public. Dr. Bouthoin's eyebrows are up, Mr. Semhians disfigures his name by greatly gaping. Shall they return to their Great ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 globe, or by the slow and silent ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... wasn't the book. It was the Galactic reaction to the book. Already feeling inferior because of the stand-offish attitude of the beings from the stars, the Homeric laughter of those same beings had been too much. It would have been bad enough if that laughter had been generated by one of the Galactics. To have had it generated by an Earthman made it that much worse. Against an Earthman, their rage was ...
— A World by the Tale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... old Homeric infinitive in menai, and you find its explanation in the Sanskrit termination mane, i.e. manai, the native of the suffix man (not, as others suppose, the locative of a suffix mana), by which a large number of nouns are formed in Sanskrit. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... out a series of jokes and puns upon hats and heads, and hair and hair-oil, etc. In the midst of Homeric laughter a knock resounded, and was heard, in spite of an uproar of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... Great beads of sweat stood out on Bentley's bronzed forehead as he renewed his efforts; the stout hickory sapling bent and crackled beneath the pressure of the two men, but held on, and the boat slowly but steadily began to swing clear of the ice. These two Homeric men held it off by sheer strength, until the boat was in freewater, and the men, who had sat like statues in their places, could once more use their oars. The general stepped back into his place, cool and calm as usual, and entirely unruffled ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... and so it was; the map was correct enough, but could not, like Homer, convey the whole truth. Thus vain and false are the mere human surmises and doubts which clash with Homeric writ! ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... which he had brought with him. One visit to the Public Library had quite appalled him; the vast, chill orderliness of it. He had gone there, hungry to chat about books! To the Public Library! Surely a Homeric joke for grim, tomish officialdom. But tomish officialdom had not even laughed at him; it was too official to appreciate the quality of such side-splitting innocence.... Was he likely to meet a like irresponsiveness when he should seek clothing ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the peoples of Asia Minor is from the Homeric poems (about 900 B.C.). The Chalybeans were in Pontus; west of them, the Amazonians and Paphlagonians; west of these, the Mysians; on the Hellespont, small tribes related to the Trojans; on the AEgean, the Dardanians ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... several bottles of wine; one of the new arrivals, a sober-looking young fellow with a remarkably long nose, contributed an enormous lobster which he had acquired en route, while Kosinski volunteered to fetch bread and other provender. A Homeric repast ensued, for all these Anarchists had cultivated the digestions of camels; they prepared for inevitable fasts by laying in tremendous stores when chance and good fortune permitted. While they were eating a noticeable ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... privations, 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. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... series called Mirgorod, which won the admiration of Pushkin. Next he planned a "History of Little Russia" and a "History of the Middle Ages," this last work to be in eight or nine volumes. The result of all this study was a beautiful and short Homeric epic in prose, called Taras Bulba. His appointment to a professorship in history was a ridiculous episode in his life. After a brilliant first lecture, in which he had evidently said all he had to say, he settled to a life of boredom ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... 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 good ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... impose a like character upon art. Who does not recall the great part played in literary history by the criticism of the verisimilar? For example, the fault found with the Jerusalem Delivered, based upon the history of the Crusades, or of the Homeric poems, upon that of the verisimilitude of the costume of the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... and then had called her to him and laid open a book, leading her mind to regard its mysteries. Greek! It seemed to her as if she had begun it there and then. Later the mother became the teacher. She was nursed, as it were, within sight of the windy plains of Troy and to the sound of the Homeric hymns—and all by reason ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... idea is originally, I believe, Platonic; certainly not Homeric. Egyptian possibly—but I have read nothing yet of the recent discoveries in Egypt. Not, however, quite liking to leave the matter in the complete emptiness of my own resources, I have appealed ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... yet alive!" cried the old Homeric hero of Janina, leaping with joy; and his words, passing from mouth to mouth, spread yet more terror amid Kursheed's soldiers, already overwhelmed by the horrible spectacle passing ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... only; we must travel back to older ages, known to us only by what lawyers call REAL evidence—the evidence of things. Before history began, there was at least as much progress in the military art as there has been since. The Roman legionaries or Homeric Greeks were about as superior to the men of the shell mounds and the flint implements as we are superior to them. There has been a constant acquisition of military strength by man since we know anything of him, either by the documents he has ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... hair and a long nose, the tip of which moved when she spoke. You would never have given her credit for such influence as she claimed in the world's affairs. Only her Homeric laughter, and a pair of lorgnettes, reminded ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... courses, and advised Migwan, above all things, with her talent for writing, to put the emphasis on literature and history. Migwan took a certain grim delight in telling Mrs. Bartlett what had happened to her ambition to go to college. She had a Homeric sense of humor that could see the point when the gods were playing pranks on helpless mortals. She told the story simply and frankly, without any "literary style," such as was usually present in her letters to a high degree; neither did she bewail her ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... or happiness. The laughter of the gods is described by Homer as 'the exuberance of their celestial joy after their daily banquet.'" This, perhaps, hardly agrees with the popular idea of the term "Homeric laughter." ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Homeric clouds were, perhaps, about to be required to encompass Gwynplaine and Josiana, as they did Jupiter and Juno. For Gwynplaine to be loved by a woman who could see and who saw him, to feel on his deformed mouth the pressure of divine lips, was exquisite and maddening. Before this ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... inception, and had gone no further than that spirited prologue in which the female sex so faithfully preserve the tradition of those thundering dialogues which invariably precede the manual business of the Homeric fray. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... part of the fighting." The colors of romance still drape the Chesapeake and the Shannon, Tecumseh and Tippecanoe. The hunters of Kentucky, the explorers of the Yellowstone and the Columbia, the emigrants who left their bones along the old Santa Fe Trail, are our Homeric men. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... 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 perceptible tendency to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that a dispute might arise between them in reference to the creation. But all this time no such thing has happened, nature being always the same. Hence God is one. Aristotle also agrees with us, for he applies in this connection the Homeric expression, "It is not good to have many rulers, let the ruler be one" (Iliad, II, 204; Arist., Metaphysics, XII, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... and this condition of things is still found in the earliest Sanskrit literature. But in Greek before historical times the accent had become limited to the last three syllables of a word, so that a long word like the Homeric genitive feromenoio could in no circumstances be accented on either of its first two syllables, while if the final syllable was long, as in the accusative plural feromenous, the accent could go back only to the second syllable from the end. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... for the Liversedge boys, and they were anticipating the election with all the fervour of British youth. That morning there had been a splendid fight at the Grammar School; they described it with great vigour and amplitude, waxing Homeric in their zeal. Dickinson junior had told Tom Harte that Gladstone was a "blackguard"; whereupon Tom smote him between the eyes, so that the vile calumniator measured his length in congenial mud. The conflict spread. Twenty or thirty boys ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... my young fancy, go up with Jonathan, the son of Saul, to smite the garrisoned Philistines of Michmash, or with the fierce son of Nun against the cities of Canaan? Why was Mr. Greatheart, in Pilgrim's Progress, my favorite character? What gave such fascination to the narrative of the grand Homeric encounter between Christian and Apollyon in the valley? Why did I follow Ossian over Morven's battle-fields, exulting in the vulture-screams of the blind scald over his fallen enemies? Still later, why did the newspapers furnish me with subjects for hero-worship in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... man must have felt when he set about conquering the elements, subduing land and sea and savagery. And in that lies the Homeric greatness of this vast fresh New World of ours. Your Old World victor takes up the unfinished work left by generations of men. Your New World hero begins at the pristine task. I pray you, who are ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... a feast after the Homeric fashion. A sheep was "cut," disembowelled, dismembered, tossed into one of our huge caldrons, and devoured within the hour: the almost live food [25] was washed down with huge draughts of milk. The feasters resembled Wordsworth's cows, "forty feeding like one:" in the left hand they held ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... an idea of how this admiration was reciprocated, from Southey's criticism on "Gebir," in the Critical Review for September, 1799. Of Gebir's speech to the Gadites, he says: "A passage more truly Homeric than the close of this extract we do not remember in the volumes of modern poetry." He took the entire poem as a model in blank verse. After Southey's death, Landor used his influence with Lord Brougham to obtain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... more than one dynasty of gods had passed over the golden stage of Olympus, had made their exit, and were hurrying onward to oblivion. It was matter of notoriety, also, that all these gods were and had been liable to the taint of sorrow for the death of their earthly children, (as the Homeric Jupiter for Sarpedon, Thetis for Achilles, Calliope, in Euripides, for her blooming Rhesus;) all were liable to fear; all to physical pain; all to anxiety; all to the indefinite menaces of a danger not measurable.[Footnote: it must not be forgotten that all the superior gods passed through ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... regarded the Parmenides as a 'reductio ad absurdum' of the Eleatic philosophy. But would Plato have been likely to place this in the mouth of the great Parmenides himself, who appeared to him, in Homeric language, to be 'venerable and awful,' and to have a 'glorious depth of mind'? (Theaet.). It may be admitted that he has ascribed to an Eleatic stranger in the Sophist opinions which went beyond the doctrines of the Eleatics. But the Eleatic stranger expressly criticises the doctrines ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... piazzas, lofty apartments, galleries, terraced roofs, and, in fact, everything an African house should have, still stood there; but all shut up, as if the antique domus were in mourning for the past. What Homeric feeds, what noctes coenoeque deorum, we have had there in joyous past times! But now that most hospitable of West-Coasters, Commissary Blanc, has been laid in the sandy cemetery; and where, oh! where are the rest of the jovial crew, Martin and Sherwood? I found only one ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... 'the mother of flocks' in the Homeric Hymn to Pan, and Polybius had described the softening effects of music upon its rude inhabitants. See some interesting remarks on the snbject by J. E. Sandys, in his lectures on the Revival of Learning, Cambridge, 1905; also J. P. Mahaffy, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... his eyebrows at Elizabeth, at the bright fire behind her, and all the comfort of the new farmhouse. Yet under his shuffling manner there was a certain note of confidence. He was appealing to that Homeric hospitality which prevails throughout ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... answer. They were given over to lies. The bare idea of women pretending to concern themselves with public affairs—from the point of view of the Press, it was enough to make the soberest sides shake with Homeric laughter. ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... fresh portion of beef, another pint of wine, another half-loaf of bread. For upwards of an hour the gang ate. It was no longer a supper. It was a veritable barbecue, a crude and primitive feasting, barbaric, homeric. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... in the light of them the Greek claim to exclusive wisdom had been shattered. Josephus had made himself master of the current knowledge of the subject. The Greeks learnt their letters from the Phoenicians, they have no record more ancient than the Homeric poems, and even Homer did not leave his poems in writing,[1] while their earliest historians lived but shortly before the Persian expedition into Greece, and their earliest philosophers, Pythagoras and Thales, learnt what they ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... recognised that Homer was poetical and referred his works, mischievous as they might prove incidentally, to divine inspiration. Poetic madness, like madness in prophecy or love, bursts the body of things to escape from it into some ideal; and even the Homeric world, though no model for a rational state, was a cheerful heroic vision, congenial to many early impulses and dreams of ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... moment, fallen on and destroyed the artillery which was being brought up to sweep the English squares at close quarters. At Waterloo, as in so many other combats, the account of Ney's behaviour more resembles that of a Homeric hero than of a modern general. To the ideal commander of to-day, watching the fight at a distance, calmly weighing its course, undisturbed except by distant random shots, it is strange to compare Ney staggering through the gate of Konigsberg all covered with blood; smoke ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... interest, and the latter part is so directly in the day's movement, that I am not without hope but some may read it; and if they don't, a murrain on them! Here is, for the first time, a tale of Greeks - Homeric Greeks - mingled with moderns, and all true; Odysseus alongside of Rajah Brooke, PROPORTION GARDEE; and all true. Here is for the first time since the Greeks (that I remember) the history of a handful of men, where all know each other in the eyes, and live close ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... carried away from the conventional dress of the Dublin streets, and had to be made to feel that the characters in "The Racing Lug" were primitive fishermen, and the people of "Connla" and "Deirdre" the people of Ireland's Homeric age. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... it he did over and over again, with unflagging vehemence, with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. La recherche du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en saveur, la surabondance des vocables puises a toutes ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... neighbor and pointed out that the subject seemed to excite the German—that no doubt he was longing to know the lady. Christophe blushed, muttered angrily, and finally said hotly that such women ought to be whipped. His proposition was received with a shout of Homeric laughter: and Sylvain Kohn cooingly protested that no man should touch a woman, even with a flower, etc., etc. (In Paris he was the very Knight of Love.) Christophe replied that a woman of that sort was neither more nor less than a bitch, and that there was only one remedy for vicious ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... protested against this as tyrannical proceeding. Irish Members massed below Gangway howled with delight. Their turn come now. Long they groaned under Prince ARTHUR'S iron heel. Now they've got him down, and dance round him with shouts of exultation and Homeric bursts of laughter. Hardly can his voice be heard above the din; but he pegs along, finally turning his back on jubilant mob below Gangway; addresses himself to SPEAKER, edging in a sentence amid comparative pauses in uproar. PRINCE ARTHUR protests he will not yield to force; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... 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
... other." Later on Odysseus has his adventure with the Sirens, who are always "casting a spell of penetrating song, sitting within a meadow," in order to decoy passing sailors. Charybdis is another divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin. The island nymph Calypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, until after seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home "because the nymph pleased him no more." Nor does the human Nausicaea ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... 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 sister, and through ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... of intercourse, age, and learning, and rank, and virtue were respected, and these men, whose cookery was probably as coarse as that of Homer's heroes, had around their board harpers and bards who sang poetry as gallant and fiery, though not so grand, as the Homeric ballad-singers, and flung off a ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... say that the Psalms and the Gospels have no value or little value for the world apart from the original form and language in which they were written would, of course, be absurd. Is it any less absurd to say that the study of the Homeric poems, the Attic tragedies, the works of Thucydides and Plato would have little value for students unless this literature were studied in the original language? These questions cannot properly be ignored any longer by teachers of ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... 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 model, and these books contain more variety of incident and situation than those which ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... 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 ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... 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
... "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
... for certain, my brother, that such as these are beasts. They do not consider that those rules serve principally as a frame for the Homeric poetry, and for other similar to it, and they set up one as a great poet, high as Homer, and disallow those of other vein, and art, and enthusiasm, who in their various kinds are ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... to Greece. Once on that subject, he gave free expression to his sentiments; and, I assure you, 'twas a veritable feast of ambrosia to me. The spells of the Sirens (if ever there were Sirens), of the Pindaric 'Charmers,' of the Homeric lotus, are things to be forgotten, after his truly divine eloquence. Led on by his theme, he spoke the praises of philosophy, and of the freedom which philosophy confers; and expressed his contempt for the vulgar error which sets a value upon wealth and renown and dominion and power, upon ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... ships.]—Homeric ships had prows shaped and painted to look like birds' or beasts' heads. A ship was always a wonderfully live and vivid thing to the Greek ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... on its side, ended by discovering death; and to discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality. This longing does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final, in their character, marking not the start but the close of a civilization. They indicate the transition from the old religion of Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo—of redemption. But the popular and inward ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... great advantage in all contests, the first start. As it began, so it continued. All through the great struggle the Conservatives were hopelessly behind us. As the enthusiastic Mathers afterwards remarked, "We were right on the top of them the whole time." It was a stirring and Homeric contest. To a staunch Liberal it was one that gave unalloyed satisfaction, for all through the great fight there was the amplest evidence that the flowing tide was on ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... imagination but a subconscious monophysitism. There is to most minds a haze of unreality overhanging the accounts of His life and death. They forget that He shared human experience to the full. They think of Him as doing things rheidios like the Homeric gods. In point of fact, His great results were achieved only after long laborious exertion. His was a life of strenuous human activity, physical and mental. Even His miracles were accompanied by a physical throb of sympathy; virtue went out ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... great favourite with our statesmen and, indeed, may be said to be almost a factor in our political life. For as the cross-benches form a refuge for those who have no minds to make up, so those who cannot make up their minds always take to Homeric studies. Many of our leaders have sulked in their tents with Achilles after some violent political crisis and, enraged at the fickleness of fortune, more than one has given up to poetry what was obviously meant for party. It would ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde |
