"Iliad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... people put into his grave this silver mask of an ox head with golden horns. It was a symbol of the cattle sacrificed for the dead. There is a gold rosette between the eyes. The mouth, muzzle, eyes and ears are gilded. In Homer's Iliad, which is the story of the Trojan war, Diomede says, "To thee will I sacrifice a yearling heifer, broad at brow, unbroken, that never yet hath man led beneath the yoke. Her will I sacrifice to thee, and ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall
... their political constitution. The chiefs of districts at Otaheite are powerful princes, who have not more respect for Otoo than the Greek heroes had for the "king of men;" and the common people are so little noticed in the Iliad, that they appear to have had no greater consequence, than the towtows in the South Seas. In short, I believe the similitude might be traced in many other instances; but it was my intention only to hint at it, and not to abuse the patience of my readers. What I ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... rise of new literatures, and by introduction to those of other and elder lands. The Greeks were masters of literary form, but other nations have surpassed them in some particulars. There is but one Iliad, and but one Odyssee; but also there is but one Job, but one Sakoontala, but one Hafiz-Nameh, but one Gulistan, but one Divina Commedia, but one Don Quixote, but one Faust. If the argument for the study of Greek and Latin is grounded on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... well to cite the example of poets with whom Webster, of course, cannot be compared. Among the great mental facts, palpable to the eyes of all men interested in literature, are such creations as the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, the great Shakspearian dramas, the Paradise Lost, and Faust. The commentaries and criticisms on these are numerous enough to occupy the shelves of a large library; some of them attempt to show that Homer, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... it. So it is with Taine's "English Literature" and Von Hoist's history of American politics. On the other hand it may be said that no translation of the "Odes" of Horace has any value at all; and a faithful study of one book of the "Iliad" is worth all the translations from Homer that have ever been made. But the subject ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... half slipping off the seat, with his mouth open and his overcoat bundled round his head. Andrews looked out of the window, feeling in his nostrils the tingle of steam and coal gas. A phrase out of some translation of the Iliad came to his head: "Ambrosial night, Night ambrosial unending." But better than sitting round a camp fire drinking wine and water and listening to the boastful yarns of long-haired Achaeans, was this hustling through the countryside away from the monotonous whine of past unhappiness, towards ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... perhaps, the Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem, a "dwarf Iliad," recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel, which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his Lutrin, had treated, with the same epic dignity, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... straight furrow grew deeper between his eyebrows. He remembered suddenly that his earliest ambition—the ambition of his childhood—had been that of a gentlemanly scholar of the old order. He had meant to sit in a library and read Horace, or to complete the laborious translation of the "Iliad" which his father had left unfinished. Then his studies had ended abruptly with the Greek alphabet, and from the library he had passed out to the plough. In the years of severe physical labour which followed he had felt the spirit of the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... profit, and those books of Livy for which the classic student has so long sorrowed without hope. Among these precious tomes I observed the original manuscript of the Koran, and also that of the Mormon Bible in Joe Smith's authentic autograph. Alexander's copy of the Iliad was also there, enclosed in the jewelled casket of Darius, still fragrant of the perfumes which the Persian ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Homer, in the Iliad, praises the blameless Ethiopians, beloved of the gods and dwelling in a wide land that stretches from the rising to the setting of the sun. The ancient historians praise them also. Words of commendation of this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... Thrace, said to have been blinded by the Muses for contending with them in song. The incident is given in the "Iliad," and was treated again by Sophocles, ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... means our intention to describe the Iliad of miseries, the agitations, terrors and disquietudes, the tribulation and utter harrowing to despair, which poor Frankfurt underwent, incessantly from that day forward, for about five weeks to come. "The ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... gone through Homer's Iliad—sorry to have finished it. The accounts of the Zoolu people, with Dingarn their king, etc., {64} give one a very good idea of the Homeric heroes, who were great brutes: but superior to the Gods who governed them: which also has been the ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... more, and the opening chapter of a sylvan Iliad might have begun. But this modern Helen saw it coming, and arrested it with an inspiration of feminine genius. Without being observed, she disengaged her knife from her bosom and let it fall as if by accident. It struck the ground with the point of its keen blade, bounded and rolled ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... pleasure. He made us acquainted with Homer, and taught us ancient and modern history. To this day I rejoice that not one of us ever thought of using 'pons asinorum,' or copied passage, though he was perfectly sightless, and we were obliged to translate to him and learn by heart whole sections of the Iliad. To have done so would have seemed as shameful as the pillage of an unguarded sanctuary or the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... purchase an Odyssey "as old as Homer," and what would not Cicero, that great collector, have given for the Ascraean editio princeps of Hesiod, scratched on mouldy old plates of lead? Perhaps Dr. Schliemann may find an original edition of the "Iliad" at Orchomenos; but of all early copies none seems so attractive as that engraved on the leaden plates which Pausanias saw at Ascra. Then, in modern times, what "great allies" has the collector, what brethren in book-hunting? The names are like ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... for them were taken from the Iliad, where "Deimos" and "Phobos" (Fear and Panic) are represented as the companions in battle of Ares. In several respects, they are interesting and remarkable bodies. As to size, they may be said to stand midway between meteorites and satellites. From careful photometric measures executed ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... halls of the spirits and to have seen them all assembled in the spacious wigwam. Had some bard taken up the tale of this fortunate individual, the literature of the red man might have boasted an epic ranking perhaps with the AEneid or the Iliad. ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... testimony of Nelson himself, a better fleet never carried the fortunes of a great country than that under Sir John Jervis. The mere names of the ships or of their commanders awaken more sonorous echoes than the famous catalogue of the ships in the "Iliad." Trowbridge, in the Culloden, led the van; the line was formed of such ships as the Victory, the flagship, the Barfleur, the Blenheim, the Captain, with Nelson as commodore, the Excellent, under Collingwood, the Colossus, under Murray, the Orion, under Sir James ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... in Rekhmara's tomb. The Mycenaean men allowed their hair to grow to its full natural length, like women, and wore it partly hanging down the back, partly tied up in a knot or plait (the kepas of the dandy Paris in the Iliad) on the crown of the head. This was the universal fashion, and the Keftiu are consistently depicted by the XVIIIth Dynasty Egyptians as following it. The faces in the Senmut fresco are not so well portrayed as those in the Rekhmara fresco. There it is ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poets with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... and mad with the rage The gods gave to all whom they wished to destroy, You would act a new Iliad, to darken the age With horrors beyond what is told ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... or three of Lucian's dialogues, extracts from Epictetus, Bion, and Moschus, and perhaps a book or two of Homer." "But," declares one of his former fellow-students, "Lockhart professed the whole Iliad and Odyssey and I know not how much besides." His brilliant success on this occasion led to his being offered one of the Snell Exhibitions to Oxford,—an offer which was accepted after some hesitation on account of his youth. He was not yet fifteen, and still wore the round jacket of a schoolboy ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... lying a hundred years in Poets' Corner. Even the inmates of Grub Street, even the heroes of the Dunciad, were for once just to living merit. There can be no stronger illustration of the estimation in which Congreve was held than the fact that the English Iliad, a work which appeared with more splendid auspices than any other in our language, was dedicated to him. There was not a duke in the kingdom who would not have been proud of such a compliment. Dr. Johnson expresses great admiration for ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... certain doings in a Staffordshire dingle, during the month of July 1825, begins with a battle-royal, which places Borrow high amongst the narrators of human conflicts from the days of the Iliad to those of Pierce Egan; yet the chapters that set forth this episode of the dingle are less concerned with the "gestes" than with the sayings of its occupants. Rare, indeed, are the dramatic dialogues ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... first word of the Iliad, Menis, afterwards passes into the Latin Mens; is the root of the Latin name for Athena, "Minerva," and so the root of ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... to relate, and at once I want to present to you my hero,—a hero more inspiring than Achilles of the "Iliad," or Odysseus of the "Odyssey," or AEneas of ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... the Iliad, we have, if not positive proof, at least very good reason for believing it intended as a series of lyrics; but, granting the epic intention, I can say only that the work is based in an imperfect sense of art. The modern epic ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... dramatic form with excellence of imitation, so he too first laid down the main lines of Comedy, by dramatising the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire. His Margites bears the same relation to Comedy that the Iliad and Odyssey do to Tragedy. But when Tragedy and Comedy came to light, the two classes of poets still followed their natural bent: the lampooners became writers of Comedy, and the Epic poets were succeeded by Tragedians, since the drama ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... inflict upon the reader, if I were only certain that he is one of those dreadful parents who, under the aegis of friendship, bore you at a streets corner with that remarkable thing which Freddy said the other day, and insist on singing to you, at an evening parly, the Iliad of Tommy's woes. ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... not poetry that passes for such: nor does verse make the whole difference between poetry and prose. The Iliad does not cease to be poetry in a literal translation; and Addison's Campaign has been very properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs from poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar, and irksome matters ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... lot-arrows. The Thummim have been compared in the most felicitous way by Freytag, and by Lagarde independently of him (Proph. Chald. p. xlvii.) with the Arabian Tamaim, which not only signifies children's amulets but any means of "averruncatio". Urim is probably connected with )RR "to curse" (cf. Iliad i. 11 and Numbers xxiii. 23): the two words of the formula seem mutually to ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... no discussion of principle in Greece, probably she would still have produced works of art. Homer contains no such discussion. The speeches in the 'Iliad,' which Mr. Gladstone, the most competent of living judges, maintains to be the finest ever composed by man, are not discussions of principle. There is no more tendency in them to critical disquisition than there is to political economy. In Herodotus you have the beginning of the ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... instinct. The imagination became afire with the mystery of life and Nature, and burst into the flames and frenzies of rhythm. Poetry was born, but instantly sought the wings of music for a higher flight than the mere word would permit. Even the great epics of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were originally sung or chanted by the Ilomerido, and the same essential union seems to have been in some measure demanded afterward in the Greek drama, which, at its best, was always inspired with the religious sentiment. There ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... than one hundred yards above the ground, and show, by the number of their rings, that their life began from three to five thousand years ago. Our deepest feelings of reverence are aroused when we look at a tree which was "one thousand years old when Homer wrote the Iliad; fifteen hundred years of age when Aristotle was foreshadowing his evolution theory and writing his history of animals; two thousand years of age when Christ walked upon earth; nearly four thousand years of age when the 'Origin of Species' was written. ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... a controversialist and poet, and a bishop of the broken remnant of the Catholic Church of Scotland: he is known as the author of a very humorous ballad called "The Wee bit Wifickie," and as the translator of one of the books of the Iliad, in opposition to Cowper.] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... pleasant rate, very different from that steady grubbing pace with which the Cistercians used to go over the classic ground, scenting out each word as they went, and digging up every root in the way. Pen never liked to halt, but made his tutor construe when he was at fault, and thus galloped through the Iliad and the Odyssey, the tragic playwriters, writers, and the charming wicked Aristophanes (whom he vowed to be the greatest poet of all). But he went at such a pace that, though he certainly galloped through a considerable extent of the ancient country, he clean forgot it in after-life, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... powerless. Yet he had done his best; and through his Greek lessons he humbly knew that he had helped her spiritual growth, just as the Greek immortals had helped and chastened his own youth. They had been reading Homer together—parts both of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"; and through "that ageless mouth of all the world," what splendid things had spoken to her!—Hector's courage, and Andromache's tenderness, the bitter sorrow of Priam, the pity of Achilles, mother love and wife love, death ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in "Robinson Crusoe" that a child cannot understand,—and it is all the better reading for him on that account. A child has a comfort in unintelligible words that few men can understand. Homer's "Iliad" is good reading, though only a small part may be comprehended. (We are not, however, so much in favor of mystery as to recommend the original Greek.) Do our children of the year 1860 ever read a book called "The Pilgrim's Progress"? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... in perspective, and the Doric portal of the town-house, answered in some measure the idea Montfaucon gives us of the scene of an ancient tragedy. Whenever a pompous Flemish painter attempts a representation of Troy, and displays in his background those streets of palaces described in the Iliad, Augsburg, or some such city, may easily be traced. Sometimes a corner of Antwerp discovers itself; and generally, above a Corinthian portico, rises a Gothic spire. Just such a jumble may be viewed from the statue of Augustus, under which I remained till the ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Shook the awful locks.—Ver. 179. This awful nod of Jupiter, the sanction by which he confirms his decrees, is an idea taken from Homer; by whom it is so vividly depicted at the end of the first book of the Iliad, that Phidias, in his statue of that God, admired for the awful majesty of its looks, is said to have derived his conception of the features from that description. Virgil has the same idea in the AEneid, book x; 'Annuit, et ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... and from that moment American literature received an element of vitality which was given it its noble and rapid growth. It is almost always the case that, in young nations, poetry is the first branch of letters to be developed. The earliest masterpieces of Greek and English literature are the "Iliad," the "Canterbury Tales," and the "Faerie Queene." Perhaps the best German literature before Lessing, worth remembering, was the songs ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... it, and try this people accordingly. But it is not pertinent to any practical inquiry of our time to predict what triumphs in art, literature, or government they are to accomplish, or what romance is to glow upon their history. No Iliad may be written of them and their woes. No Plutarch may gather the lives of their heroes. No Vandyck may delight to warm his canvas with their forms. How many or how few astronomers like Banneker, chieftains like Toussaint, orators ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Severus gave as a mot d'ordre to his soldiers the "No quarter" proclamation of Agamemnon. ('Iliad,' vi. 57): [Greek: ton metis ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... Iliad, as I observed in a former paper, is made to lament very pathetically that "life is not like all other possessions, to be acquired by theft". A reflection, in my opinion, evidently showing that, if he did refrain from the practice of this ...
— English Satires • Various
... most ambitious and famous of all Carlyle's writings, and in many respects his best, was not received by the public with the enthusiam it ought to have awakened. It was not appreciated by the people at large. "Ordinary readers were not enraptured by the Iliad swiftness and vividness of the narrative, its sustained passion, the flow of poetry, the touches of grandeur and tenderness, and the masterly touches by which he made the great actors stand out in their individuality." It seemed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... was so much displeased with his carping and unfair manner of finding fault, that he even refused to relieve him when in distress. The king told him, that while hundreds had earned a livelihood by pointing out the beauties of the Iliad and Odyssey in their public readings, surely one person who was so much wiser might be able to live ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... frescoes in the Vatican may yet, from engravings, form some notion of the exquisite grace of Raphael, and of the sublimity and energy of Michael Angelo. And so the genius of Homer is seen in the poorest version of the Iliad; the genius of Cervantes is seen in the poorest version of Don Quixote. Let it not be supposed that I wish to dissuade any person from studying either the ancient languages or the languages of modern Europe. Far from it. I prize most highly those ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Game Chicken that night (we had not much of a tea) in the back-green of his house in Melville street, No. 17, with considerable gravity and silence; and being at the time in the Iliad, and, like all boys, Trojans, we called ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... regret even a fault of my own, that helps to delay the publication of that paper. [This was probably a proof sheet of the Reflections.] It is the proper province, and ought to be the privilege, of an inferior to criticise and advise. The best possible critic of the Iliad, would be, ipso facto, and by virtue of that very character, incapable of being the author of it. Standing as I do in this relation to you, you would renounce your superiority, if you refused to be advised ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... clad in half-slippers of red leather, pointed at the toes. Save the slippers, the costume from head to foot was of white linen. The air of the man was high, stately, severe. Visvamitra, the greatest of the ascetic heroes of the Iliad of the East, had in him a perfect representative. He might have been called a Life drenched with the wisdom of Brahma—Devotion Incarnate. Only in his eyes was there proof of humanity; when he lifted his face from the Egyptian's breast, they were ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the evidence with regard to the tonsils and their functions seems to establish the conclusion that they have been wrongfully and foolishly held responsible for "an iliad of ills." The region of the nose and mouth is obviously the happy hunting-ground of myriads of pathogenic bacteria. It is likewise continually the scene of innumerable surgical operations, performed necessarily ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... mock and jeer, my lad. Salute him, rather, and, believe, Achilles he, of Iliad That Homer's self ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... cycle is linked to the first, not by history or race, but by the fact that the great personages in the first have now become the gods who intervene in the affairs of the wars and heroes of the second. They take part in them as the gods do in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Lugh, the Long-Handed, the great Counsellor of the Tuatha De Danaan, is now a god, and is the real father of Cuchulain, heals him of his wounds in the Battle of the Ford, warns him of his coming death, and receives him into the immortal land. The Morrigan, who descends from ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... humanity there developed into a theism so divine, clothed with a personification so exquisite and poetical, that the Hellenic mythology seems still to live in our hearts, a silent and shadowy religion without ceremonies or altars or sacrifices. The festive gods of the "Iliad" made man a deity to himself, and his soul the dwelling-place of Ideal Beauty. In this Ideal they lived, and moved and had their being, and came forth thence, bronze, marble, chryselephantine, a statuesque and naked humanity, chaste in uncomprehended sin and glorified in antique virtue. The Beauty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... are not too far back but we might have invoked their names. Joachim Camerarius, indeed, asserted having seen, on a very ancient copy of the Iliad, some verses that the copyists sacrificed because they did not understand them, and in which the poet alluded, not to the heel of Achilles (its celebrity has been well established these three thousand years,) but ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... thought of the mythical pieces and the prayers and hymns is elevated and imaginative. Some of this poetry appears to have belonged to a period earlier than 2000 B.C. Yet the Babylonians constructed no epic poem like the (Iliad,) or at any rate none such has yet been found. Their genius rather expressed itself in brief or fragmentary pieces, like the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... small parlor the pictures of the Bonanza Kings hung on the walls and she was wont, an old rheumatic figure in shiny black with the miniature pinned at her withered throat, to point to these and tell stories of the great Iliad of the Comstock. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Iliad XVII. 446: "Nothing then is more wretched anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... order Pentaur rewrote the song he had sung at Pelusium; it is preserved in three temples, and, in fragments, on several papyrus-rolls which can be made to complete each other. It was destined to become the national epic—the Iliad of Egypt. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... stanza explains the expression used in line 116. Seven days, then, we may suppose, formed the whole space of time during which the events related in the Gododin occurred. The action of Homer's Iliad occupied nearly fifty days. ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... writer too in the Edinburgh Review[13] remarks, "The oak grove at Dodona is sufficiently evident to all classic readers to need no detailed mention of its oracles, or its highly sacred character. The sacrifice of Agamemnon in Aulis, as told in the opening of the 'Iliad,' connects the tree and serpent worship together, and the wood of the sacred plane tree under which the sacrifice was made was preserved in the temple of Diana as a holy relic so late, according to Pausanias, as the second century of the Christian era." The same writer further adds that ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... own we'd give a leg if we could borrow, steal, or beg the skill old Homer used to show. (He wrote the Iliad, you know.) Old Homer swung a wicked pen, but we are ordinary men, and cannot even start to dream of doing justice to our theme. The subject of that great repast is too magnificent and vast. We can't describe (or even try) the way those rivals wolfed ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... 'Macedonian's madman.' He made a figure, it is true, in Dryden's great Ode, but what kind of a figure? He got drunk,—in very bad company, too,—and then turned fire-bug. He had one redeeming point,—he did value his Homer, and slept with the Iliad under his pillow. A poet like Homer seems to me worth a dozen such fellows as Achilles ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... or nothing in common with the art of Saint Bernard or Adam of Saint-Victor. Whatever art they have, granting that they have any, seems to go back to the cave-dwellers and the age of stone. Compared with the naivete of the "Cantico del Sole," the "Chanson de Roland" or the "Iliad" is a triumph of perfect technique. The value is not in the verse. The "Chant of the Sun" is another "Pons Seclorum"—or perhaps rather a "Pons Sanctorum"—over which only children and saints can pass. It is almost a paraphrase of ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... at the tombs of their masters and great men, which is still preserved among the negroes of Africa, obtained also among the antients, Greeks as well as Romans. I could never, without horror and indignation, read that passage in the twenty-third book of the Iliad, which describes twelve valiant Trojan captives sacrificed by the inhuman Achilles at the tomb ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Mr. Gladstone compares the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," which he believed to be the poems of one poet, Homer, with the Old Testament writings, and observes that "Homer can never be put into competition with the Scriptures as touching the great fundamental, ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... centuries behind Syracuse in building pleasure crafts. Think of a superb cabin with staterooms containing beds (not bunks) for one hundred and twenty guests, and the floors all covered with agates and other precious stones, that formed a mosaic copy of the Iliad! If you wished to emphasize a discussion on connubial devotion, behold! there on your right, Andromache and Hector; if one's husband objected to a harmless flirtation, lo! on the left, Agamemnon and Briseis; and to point the moral of 'pretty is, as pretty does'—how ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... copy of which,—in the only true translation extant,—for, judging from its surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be,—I found in the house of a neighbour. Next came the Iliad; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes of Bernard Lintot. With what power, and at how early an age, true genius impresses! I saw, even at this immature period, that no other writer could cast ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... humour—the faculty that is distinctive of some of the best of his mots, such as that when looking at Edmund Yates's book-shelves which caused him to pause before one of the volumes and read off "Homer's Iliad," and murmur, "Homer's—Yes—that is the best." On one occasion he, with Mr. George Chester (my informant), was on a visit to Mark Lemon at Crawley, and at the breakfast-table a discussion arose between the two men upon noses, their shapes and characteristics. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 28, 1641; Samuel and Mary Boreman were undoubtedly among its earliest members. His first pastor there was Rev. Richard Denton, whom Cotton Mather describes, as "a little man with a great soul, an accomplished mind in a lesser body, an Iliad in a nutshell; blind of an eye, but a great seer; seeing much of what eye hath not seen." In the deep forests, amid the cabins of settlers, and the wigwams of savages, he composed a system of Divinity entitled "Soliloquia Sacra." Rev. John Sherman, born in Dedham, England, ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman
... last new song or 'bon mot' and the gossip of the day were the sole topics of conversation in the Queen's parties. Wit was banished from them. The Comtesse Diane, more inclined to literary pursuits than her sister-in-law, one day, recommended her to read the "Iliad" and "Odyssey." The latter replied, laughing, that she was perfectly acquainted with the Greek poet, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... you took away Our former adoration: The Iliad, you may us say, Was mere conglomeration. Think it not crime in any way: Youth's fervent adoration Leads us to know the verity, ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... ignominious. It would be used so long as the politicians of the party needed moral support and eloquent advocacy, and spurned as soon as its services were no longer necessary. The taunt of Helen to Aphrodite in the third book of the 'Iliad' sounds very apposite when we read the speeches of some clerical 'Christian Socialists,' who find it more exciting to organise processions of the unemployed than to ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad. ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... office of forming the young mind of Greece to noble thoughts and bold deeds. To be read in Homer soon became the education of a gentleman; and a rule, recognized in her free age, remained as a tradition even in the times of her degradation. Xenophon introduces to us a youth who knew both Iliad and Odyssey by heart; Dio witnesses that they were some of the first books put into the hands of boys; and Horace decided that they taught the science of life better than Stoic or Academic. Alexander the Great nourished his imagination by the scenes ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... mystery of the father's exile and an amusing complication of lovers afforded a suspensive interest well sustained to the end. There were innumerable charming scenes, as where the girl in the outlandish costume in which she roamed the hills perches on a boulder and recites the "Iliad" to her suitors. In the last act she appears at a ball at a country house in sophisticated raiment, and the story ends in the key of mirth in ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... constitution of matter, and the unreality of time." To this period belongs also the earliest conception of The Dynasts, an old note-book containing, under the date June 20th, 1875, the suggestion that the author should attempt "An Iliad of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... books to those I am most intimately acquainted with:—my Elzevir Horace to T. Randolph—he will find translations of the best odes upon the fly leaves, much better than any he could make; my Greek books, the Iliad, Graeca Minora, Herodotus, etc., which are almost entirely free from dog-ears and thumb-marks, as I have never opened them, I give to L. Burwell, requesting that he will thenceforth apply himself to Greek in earnest. My Hebrew books I give to Fairfax, the janitor, as he ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... We should now find ourselves able to enjoy those wonderful works of literature which we had always been hearing about from the lips of others, but had never been able to know directly. How we should revel in the prospect before us! At last to be able to read the "Iliad"! To follow the fortunes of wandering Ulysses! To accompany Dante in his mystical journey through the three worlds! To dare with Macbeth and to doubt with Hamlet! Our trouble would be that we should not know which to select first. We should wish we had the eyes ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... does the Iliad describe or narrate? The downfall of Troy, which was the most memorable event in the early history of the ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... these were Lord Clarendon, High Chancellor of England, concerning whom much has already been said; and Thomas Hobbs of Malmesbury, better known as author of "The History of the Causes of the Civil War," and of "Human Nature," than as a translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Dr. Gilbert Burnet, author of "The History of his Own Times;" and Dr. Ralph Cudworth, author of "The True Intellectual System of the Universe," were likewise men of note. But one whose name is far more familiar ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... lofty as the mountains, at whose feet kneel and pray ant-like human beings. The poet was hymning the homeric struggle of the great goddesses, whose lances had clashed together since the beginning of the ages: the eternal Iliad which is to that of Troy what the Alps are to ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... speak, before all, the language of the people, the language of its aspirations towards freedom, which must be heard before everything else, if the nation is to acquire its true rights. Even as, in the Iliad, the orphaned Andromache says to the parting Hector: 'Thou art now father, brother, and dear mother to me!' so the Russian people may say to its jury: 'You are now legislators, judges, and the source of mercy at one and the same time to me! In you there ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... the art-products of mankind he manifests the same curious dryness and mechanical literality of judgment—a dryness increased by pride in his non-conformity. He would, for example, rather give a large sum than read to the end of Homer's Iliad,—the ceaseless repetition of battles, speeches, and epithets like well-greaved Greeks, horse-breaking Trojans; the tedious enumeration of details of dresses, arms, and chariots; such absurdities as giving the genealogy of a horse while in the midst of a battle; and the appeals ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... draws our attention to the fact that Homer says this of Here and not of Iris (Iliad, V, 778); it is only another proof that the text of Homer has reached us in a corrupted form, or it may be that Aristophanes was liable, like other people, ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... he proceeds to call the once well-known verses of Dryden in the "Indian Emperor," descriptive of the hush of night, "vague, bombastic, and senseless," and Pope's celebrated translation of the moonlight scene in the "Iliad," altogether "absurd,"—and then, without ever once dreaming of any necessity of showing them to be so, or even, if he had succeeded in doing so, of the utter illogicality of any argument drawn from their failure to establish ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... reasonable means had been found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon, which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... sufficiently shows how your mind keeps the whole wealth of its conceptions in one beautiful unity. You can never have expected that your life would suffice to attain such an end, but to have struck out such a path is worth more than reaching the end of any other; and you, like Achilles in the Iliad, made your choice between Phthia and immortality. Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and had you from infancy been placed in the midst of choice natural surroundings and of an idealizing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... writing. "Deep calleth unto deep." It reminds us of Pope's translation of that tremendous passage in the 8th Book of the Iliad, where Jove comes forth, and darts his angry lightnings in the eyes of the Grecians, and repels and appals their mightiest; Nestor alone, but with his horse wounded by the dart of Paris, sustaining the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... them all and try to understand life as he did. I did in fact later begin a course of reading in the early morning hours, but I was caught by some fantastic notion of chronological order and early legendary form. Pope's translation of the "Iliad," even followed by Dryden's "Virgil," did not leave behind the residuum of wisdom for which I longed, and I finally gave them up for a thick book entitled "The History of the World" as affording a shorter and ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Aphrodite in her naked glory. And again in "Rueckkehr," p. 51, the poet confesses that having wandered to the East to forget his misery and finding thorns in the rose-gardens of Persia, and demons, misshapen gods and monkeys acting the parts of heroes in India, he is glad to return to the Iliad and Odyssey (cf. also "Zu den ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... peoples much below the civilized condition of the Peruvians. Long poems, extending to three and four hundred lines, were retained by memory, and transmitted from generation to generation among the Sandwich Islanders. Many scholars have believed that all the early literature of Greece, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, and all other "poems of the Cycle," was preserved in this way by the Rhapsodists for centuries, down to the time of Peisistratus, and then for the first time reduced to writing. This shows at least what they have ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... "considerations" in opposition that the good-natured President withdrew his suggestion, and, as a consequence, the dismal Ilium on the Potomac became the bone of a four years' contention, whose vicissitudes exceed the incidents of the Iliad. Great armies, created by an inspired commander, were wasted upon the defense of a capital that no one would have lamented had it been again burned, and of which to-day there is scarcely a remnant, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... mules and dogs the infection first began, And, last, the vengeful arrows fix'd on man. POPE'S Homer's Iliad, I. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... animated discussion with Hammond on the relative attractions of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey;" her opinion differed from his, and she was well able to hold her ground. Her face was now both eloquent and attractive, her eyes were bright, her words terse and epigrammatic. She looked so different ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad," we feel something of this. Beholding as Homer did, from the tower of contemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change, he must look underneath the show for the reality. Great captains and conquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... well as to the brute creation. Society will then attend to it. When a victim fell before Achilles or Diomedes, that victim begged for mercy. The spear then went through his bowels. The times demanded it. They knew no mercy. There is no mercy in the Iliad. The Barons, also, were a crowd of thugs. To-day, in New York, or London, or Paris, they would each get twenty years on general principles. We have no sluggers who are not their superiors. The atheist should know it, and does. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... who, it is said, has left very vivid and infinitely diversified pictures of all the passions and affections, public and private, incident to human nature,—the relations of son, of brother, parent, friend, citizen, and many others. Longinus preferred the Iliad to the Odyssey, on account of the greater number of battles it contains; but I can neither agree to his criticism, nor assent to the present objection. It is true, there is little action in this part of Milton's poem; but there is much repose, and more ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... The "Iliad" for war; the "Odyssey" for wandering; but where is the great domestic epic? Yet it is but commonplace to say, that passions may rage round a tea-table, which would not have misbecome men dashing at one another in war-chariots; and evolutions of patience and temper are performed ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... all well here. I am better since it is not cold any more, and I am working a great deal. I am also doing many water colors, I am reading the Iliad with Aurore, who does not like any translation except Leconte de Lisle's, insisting that Homer ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... indicates only the ignorance of its employers. Nevertheless, we are triumphantly told, it is reiterated continually, that a regular work cannot be ascribed to the concurrence of chance. Never, we are informed, will it be possible to arrive at the formation of a poem such as the Iliad, by means of letters thrown together promiscuously or combined at random. We agree to it without hesitation; but, ingenuously, are the letters which compose a poem thrown with the hand in the manner ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... first and the prince of poets; he celebrated the siege of Troy in the Iliad and Odyssey, two epic poems which have never been surpassed. In the same kind of composition he was followed, nine hundred years after, by Virgil, in the Eneid; by Tasso, after another fifteen hundred years, in the 'Jerusalem Delivered.' The Greeks also boasted of their Pindar and Anacreon ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... if there is any sadder image of human fate than the great Homeric story. The main features in the character of Achilles are its intense desire of justice, and its tenderness of affection. And in that bitter song of the Iliad, this man, though aided continually by the wisest of the gods, and burning with the desire of justice in his heart, becomes yet, through ill- governed passion, the most unjust of men: and, full of the deepest tenderness in his heart, becomes yet, through ill-governed ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... beer a day means an appreciable loss in working efficiency. [Footnote: Accounts of the experiments will be found in H. S. Williams, op. cit, pp. 5-23, 128, 137; H. S. Warner, op. cit, p. 116. They had some realization of this truth even in the days of the Iliad. Hector says, "Bring me luscious wines, lest they unnerve my limbs and make me lose my ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Greeks had apparently long been settled in Greece and Asia Minor as far back as 1500 B.C. Probably they arrived in these districts much earlier. The earliest literary productions are the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, which very likely go back to the ninth century B.C. From the sixth century B.C. on, Greek literature is continuous. Modern Greek, when we consider its distance in time from antiquity, is remarkably similar to ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... mean the literature which has proved itself to be supreme—supreme by virtue of its conquest over time and over changes in thought and environment. The Iliad and the Odyssey are in a language which we should have to learn if only for the sake of these two epics; they still profoundly interest us, they present emotions which can still move us; without Homer, the society ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... family is a smaller community than the village community, the city, or the state; and the smaller the community, the more tenacious it is of its customs and traditions. The toys of Athenian children, which have been discovered, are, all, the toys which children continue to use to this day. In the Iliad children built sand-castles on the sea-shore as they do now; and the little child tugged at its mother's dress then as now. Children then as now would insist that the tales told to them should always be ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... the shield of AEneas is in imitation of Homer's beautiful description in the Iliad of the shield of Achilles, also made ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... with the site of Troy. Well versed in the Iliad, he sought for, and believed he identified, the various localities mentioned ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... of them would look like a Bible genealogy, and were I to undertake the task of giving it, I should be obliged to invoke the muse, as Homer does before he begins the catalogue of the ships in his second Iliad. How long the currency of such compositions may continue, how many may be annually poured forth from the press, is more than any man can say, without being endued with the spirit of prophesy. But, without making any such pretensions, ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... stalk. You at first are inclined to say, How very absurd, to put only one tree on Parnassus! but this one tree is the Immortal Plane Tree, planted by Agamemnon, and at once connects our Poesia with the Iliad. Then, this is the hem of the robe of Poetry,—this is the divine vegetation which springs up under her feet,—this is the heaven and earth united by her power,—this is the fountain of Castalia flowing out afresh among the grass,—and these are the drops with which, out of a pitcher, Poetry ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... him, for the professor knew just about what would be required at the entrance examination, and he had kept the boy digging away away at the propositions in the First Book of Euclid, had drilled him in Caesar, caused him to spend weary hours over Virgil and the Iliad, and made him not a little ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... siecles et demi."—Fournier, L'Esprit dans l'Histoire. What shall we say to the story told by Zonaras and repeated by Pancirole, of the burning, in the reign of the Emperor Basilisc, of the library of Constantinople, containing one hundred and twenty thousand volumes, and among them a copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey, written in golden letters on parchment made from the intestines of ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... embraces were over, Roland inquired about the stoppage of the diligence. Madame de Montrevel had been chary of mentioning it; Sir John had been sober in statement, but not so Edouard. It was his Iliad, his very own. He related it with every detail—Jerome's connivance with the bandits, the pistols loaded with powder only, his mother's fainting-fit, the attention paid to her by those who had caused it, his own name known to the bandits, the fall of ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... Rome, as has been already noted, were amongst the lowest slaves, yet it was not so more anciently; Sarah and Rebecca cook, and so do Patroclus and Automedon in the ninth Iliad. It were to be wished indeed, that the Reader could be made acquainted with the names of our master-cooks, but it is not in the power of the Editor to gratify him in that; this, however, he may be assured of, that as the Art ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... the oldest epic in Sanscrit literature, and is sevenfold greater in bulk than the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" taken together. This remarkable poem contains almost all the history of ancient India, so far as it can be recovered, together with inexhaustible details of its political, social, and religious life—in fact, the antique Hindoo world stands epitomized in it. The ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... fiction's harlequinade. This fable about the Pleiades, the seven Sisters, Atlas, and Hercules exists identical in subject, though under other names, in the sacred Hindu books, and has likewise the same occult meaning. But then like the Ramayana "borrowed from the Greek Iliad" and the Bhagavat-Gita and Krishna plagiarized from the Gospel—in the opinion of the great Sanskritist, Prof. Weber, the Aryans may have also borrowed the Pleiades and their Hercules from the same source! When the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various |
