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noun
Homer  n.  (Baseball) Same as Home run. The poet to whom is assigned by very ancient tradition the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and of certain hymns to the gods ("Homeric Hymns"). Other poems also, as the "Batrachomyomachia" ("Battle of the Frogs and Mice"), were with less certainty attributed to him. Of his personality nothing is known. Seven cities Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis (in Cyprus), Chios, Argos, and Athens contended for the honor of being his birthplace: of these, the best evidence connects him with Smyrna. He was said to have died on the island of Ios. The tradition that he lived on the island of Chios, and in his old age was blind, is supported by the Hymn to the Delian Apollo. Modern destructive criticism has led to the doubt whether such a person as Homer existed at all, the great epics which bear that name being supposed to be, in their existing form, of a composite character, the product of various persons and ages. It is altogether probable, however, that the nucleus of the Iliad, at least, was the work of a single poet of commanding genius. (See Iliad, Odyssey, and the quotation below.) Various dates have been assigned to Homer. According to Herodotus he lived about 850 b. c.; others give a later date, and some a date as early as 1200 b. c. His poems were sung by professional reciters (rhapsodists, who went from city to city. (See Homeridae.) They were given substantially their present form by Pisistratus or his sons Hipparchus and Hippias, who ordered the rhapsodists to recite them at the Panathenaic festival in their order and completeness. The present text of the poems, with their division into books, is based upon the work of the Alexandrine critics. Note: We may assume it as certain that there existed in Ionia schools or fraternities of epic rhapsodists who composed and recited heroic lays at feasts, and often had friendly contests in these recitations. The origin of these recitations may be sought in northern Greece, from which the fashion migrated in early days to Asia Minor. We may assume that these singers became popular in many parts of Greece, aud that they wandered from court to court, glorifying the heroic ancestors of the various chiefs. One among them, called Homer, was endowed with a genius superior to the rest, and struck out a plot capable of nobler and larger treatment. It is likely that this superiority was not recognized at the time, and that he remained all his life a singer like the rest, a wandering minstrel, possibly poor and blind. The listening public gradually stamped his poem with their approval, they demanded its frequent recitation, and so this Homer began to attain a great posthumous fame. But when this fame led people to inquire into his life and history, it had already passed out of recollection, and men supplied by fables what they had forgotten or neglected. The rhapaodists, however, then turned their attention to expanding and perfecting his poem, which was greatly enlarged and called the Iliad. In doing this they had recourse to the art of writing, which seems to have been in use when Homer framed his poem, but which was certainly employed when the plan was enlarged with episodes. The home of the original Homer seems to have been about Smyrna, and in contact with both Aeolic and Ionic legends. Hia date is quite uncertain: it need not be placed before 800 B. C., and is perhaps later, but not after 700 a. c.






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"Homer" Quotes from Famous Books



... out of himself, as Shakspeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate other existences, but in himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul to embrace all forms and modes of being. He would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one; for his Homer is not so properly a translation as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and passion which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. His ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... being a new discovery was laughed at by the Philadelphians, who, in their Sunday parties across the Delaware, had seen every farmer's cart mounted on such wheels. The writer in the paper, supposes the English workman got his idea from Homer. But it is more likely the Jersey farmer got his idea from thence, because ours are the only farmers who can read Homer; because, too, the Jersey practice is precisely that stated by Homer: the English practice very different. Homer's words are (comparing a young hero killed ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... Oh! my friends, those who believe, or fancy they believe, such things, and can preach such doctrines without pity and sorrow, know not of what they rob a mankind already but too miserable by its own folly and its own sin—a mankind which if it have not hope in God and in Christ, is truly, as Homer said of old, more miserable than the ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley

... county from which I hail. [Applause, naturally.] Its loyalty to the party has been tested on many fields of battle [Anglice, in many elections] and it has never wavered in the contest Wherever the fate of battle was trembling in the balance [Homer, and since Homer, Tom, Dick and Harry] Alameda county stepped into the breach and rescued ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... verses burn, Should seem to you a pleasant turn, Take them to freely tear away Or burn. But, oh! not so I'd say, If this were Mery's room to-day. That noble poet! Happy town, Marseilles the Greek, that him doth own! Daughter of Homer, fair to see, Of Virgil's son the mother she. To you I'd say, Hold, children all, Let but your eyes on his work fall; These papers are the sacred nest In which his crooning fancies rest; To-morrow winged to Heaven they'll ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... it was a good paper and perhaps it was bad enough to make Homer turn over in his grave. I've studied and mulled over notebooks until I'm incapable of forming an opinion of anything. How thankful little Phil will be when all this ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... which was made in choice Romaic—and which, doubtless, sounded much more heroic and elegant in that idiom than in simple English, was highly applauded by his followers—indeed, had they ever heard of Homer, they would have considered it equal in substance and talent to anything ever uttered by the most valiant of the heroes he speaks of. It was scarcely concluded, however—and they were still discussing the subject, when the ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... cry aloud for mercy, sir!" exclaimed the professor, for he it was who had suddenly come to the rescue, forgetting even the pain of his ankle in the crisis. "Even in Homer you may find it written, 'Never kick ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering

... since you left me, the most exquisite entertainment, in the perusal of the noble works of Ossian, the greatest poet, in my opinion, that ever composed, and who exceeds Homer, Virgil, and Milton. He transports us by the grandeur of his sublime, or by some sudden start of tenderness he melts us into distress: Who can read, without the warmest emotions, the pathetic complaints of the venerable old bard, when he laments his blindness, and the ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell

... he was, he was continually haunted by this apparition, which had at once assumed such domination over him. Often he went seeking her, and all that he saw of her was so noble and praiseworthy that he is moved to apply to her the words of Homer: "She seems not the daughter of mortal man, but of God." And he further says: "Though her image, which stayed constantly with me, gave assurance to Love to hold lordship over me, yet it was of such noble virtue that it never suffered Love to rule me without ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... vastly to the interest of this legend is that we find it in Homer. It is essentially the same with the belt of Aphrodite (Hymn, l. 88). In Iliad xiv., 214, Aphrodite takes it off and lends it to Hr to charm Zeus withal. When we add that just above in the same context (Iliad xiv., 165) Hr also has a curiously contrived ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... siedet, und brauset, and zischt," etc. Goethe was particularly struck with the truthfulness of these lines, of which his personal observation at the Falls of the Rhine enabled him to judge. Schiller modestly owns his obligations to Homer's descriptions of Charybdis, Odyss. I., 12. The property of the higher order of imagination to reflect truth, though not familiar to experience, is singularly illustrated in this description. Schiller had never seen ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... to be done to the memory of Shakespeare, Germany could not be absent, for next to Goethe and Schiller there is no poet so truly loved by us, so thoroughly our own, as your Shakespeare. He is no stranger with us, no mere classic, like Homer, or Virgil, or Dante, or Corneille, whom we admire as we admire a marble statue. He has become one of ourselves, holding his own place in the history of our literature, applauded in our theatres, read ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... talking to his horse in Greek, quoting from Homer. Look here, my friend!" he said, ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... 2. Mrs. Homer A. Payne invites Miss Eva Milton to dine with her next week Thursday at eight o'clock. Write ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... in his scholarship, and during the last six months before leaving to enter Williams College, in 1868, Mr. Tufts says he did seem "to catch something of the spirit of Cicero and Virgil and Homer [where was Horace?], and to catch a little ambition for an education." His gentle preceptor thus summed up the characteristics of the youth he was ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... of the Emperor Claudius, that he retained in memory all Homer, Sallust, Demosthenes, Avicen, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various

... companion. Many a man could give no account of the faculty within him, but achieved success because he could not help it; and did, in an hour and without effort, that which another could not effect with half a life's labour. There were young sculptors who had never read a line of Homer, who took on themselves nevertheless to interpret and continue the heroic Greek art. There were young painters with the strongest natural taste for low humour, comic singing, and Cyder-Cellar jollifications, who would imitate nothing ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... his art, he must endeavor to copy after the originals of the most excellent masters; the same rule is also applicable to all the other arts and sciences which adorn the commonwealth; thus, whoever aspires to a reputation for prudence and patience, must imitate Ulysses, in whose person and toils Homer draws a lively picture of those qualities; so also Virgil, in the character of AEneas, delineates filial piety, courage, and martial skill, being representations of not what they really were, but of what they ought to be, in order to serve as models ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... Homer Rendered into English Blank Verse. By Edward, Earl of Derby. With a biographical sketch of Lord Derby by R. Shelton Mackenzie, D.C.L. Popular edition. ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis

... were at the store soon after sunrise, and had everything in order before our employers arrived. Young gentlemen in those days did many things that are now the porter's work, making fires, sweeping the store, etc., quite new duties to us, who were fresh from Academic shades, and from communion with Homer, Virgil, and Horace. I can't say we enjoyed it much. Neither did we like the lifting of heavy packages and being ordered about as if we were inferiors. But we did not shirk our duty, and kept our tempers. John, good fellow, came ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins

... genealogy connects the Achaeans closely with the Ionians, but historically they approach nearer to the Aeolians. Some even hold that Aeolus is only a form of Achaeus. In the Homeric poems (1000 B.C.) the Achaeans are the master race in Greece; they are represented both in Homer and in all later traditions as having come into Greece about three generations before the Trojan war (1184 B.C.), i.e. about 1300 B.C. They found the land occupied by a people known by the ancients as Pelasgians, who continued down to classical times ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... not improperly be compared with the most glorious struggles recorded in the annals of liberty, and of a state of society perhaps the most romantic and the most nearly resembling that described in the songs of Homer which the progress of civilization has now left for ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie

... world has been told that Pope has disappeared from the sky of literature, but the world looks up, and behold, there is the star shining just as before. Many scholars and many poets have scoffed at his translations of {198} Homer, but generations of English school-boys have learned to love the "Iliad" because of the way in which Pope has told them the story; and as to the telling of a story, the judgment of a school-boy sometimes counts for more than the judgment of a sage. Pope's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are certainly ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... translation of Marcus Aurelius, and for the translation and selections from the Greek tragic writers. I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. DANIEL W. WILDER, of Kansas, for the quotations from Pilpay, with contributions from Diogenes Laertius, Montaigne, Burton, and Pope's Homer; to Dr. WILLIAM J. ROLFE for quotations from Robert Browning; to Mr. JAMES W. MCINTYRE for quotations from Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Robert Browning, and Tennyson. And I have incurred other obligations to friends for here a little ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... themselves constantly in works of translation. The most distinguished of the Armenian literati now living at San Lazzaro is the Reverend Father Gomidas Pakraduni, who has published an Armenian version of "Paradise Lost," and whose great labor the translation of Homer, has been recently issued from the convent press. He was born at Constantinople of an ancient and illustrious family, and took religious orders at San Lazzaro, where he was educated, and where for twenty-five years after his consecration he held the professorship ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... laity,—the open volume of the world, upon which, with a pen of sunshine and destroying fire, the inspired Present is even now writing the annals of God. Methinks the editor who should understand his calling, and be equal thereto, would truly deserve that title that Homer bestows upon princes. He would be the Moses of our nineteenth century; and whereas the old Sinai, silent now, is but a common mountain, stared at by the elegant tourist, and crawled over by the hammer of the geologist, he must find his tables of the new law here ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... in the way that Homer did. (This cartoon, by the way, caused Punch to be excluded for a while from ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... avoid the Blues, No matter when, or how; For literature is quite beneath The higher classes now. Though Raphael paint, or Homer sing, Oh! never seem to feel; Young ladies should not have a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various

... spirit of catholic curiosity, he has sung, the fall of Troy, the Roman adventures, the mediaeval battles and crusades, the fields of Agincourt and Waterloo, and the more modern revolutions. Since Homer, he has spoken with martial eloquence through, the voices of Drayton, Spenser, Marlowe, Webster, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott, Burns, Campbell, Tennyson, Browning, the New England group, and Walt Whitman,—to mention only a few of the British and American names,—and he speaks sincerely and ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke

... the more than Homeric endeavor on Homer's sea, lay an assemblage of shipping such as no harbor had ever held. Within sight of Troy they came and went, and in the classic waters ringed round by classic hills waited for the day, a great armada, line ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood

... faithfully than any other writer of his century does Kheraskoff represent the pseudo-classical style in Russian epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry, for he wrote all sorts of things, including sentimental novels. To the classical enthusiasts of his day he seemed the "Russian Homer," and his long poems, "The Rossiad" (1789) and "Vladimir" (1786), were confidently believed to be immortal, being the first tolerable specimens of the epic style in Russian literature. In twelve long cantos he celebrates the capture of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... as if unhearing. Harvey D. walked to the opposite wall and straightened a picture, The Reading of Homer, shifting its frame precisely one ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... by giving it up, we might hope to construct a similar work of art before the eyes of our countrymen, by giving up or changing the substance. The immeasurable result which has followed works wherein the form has been retained—such as the Homer of Voss, and the Shakespeare of Tieck and Schlegel—is an incontrovertible evidence of the vitality ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... View of the Bible.—The Bible is not inspired at all, or at least in no way differing from any other book. Its authors were inspired, perhaps, just as Homer, or Thucydides, or Cicero were inspired, but not differently. It has no authority, therefore, over any other book, and is just as liable to be in error as any other. If you should bind in one volume the histories of Herodotus, Tacitus, Gibbon, and Mr. Bancroft, the poems of ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... in estimating the weight of a talent. Dr. Gill considers it about sixty pounds; this was the lesser Roman talent. Michaelis estimates the Jewish talent at thirty-two pounds and a half. The attic talent of gold used in Greece in the time of Homer is estimated at less than an ounce. The safest conclusion as to the weight of the hail-stones is, that they were enormous, and fell with a velocity to crush all animals to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. But can you see or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that mechanical art, and from these individually dead atoms, sensation, thought, and emotion are to arise? Are you likely to extract Homer out of the rattling of dice, or the Differential Calculus out of the clash of billiard balls?" Could any vitalist, or Bergsonian idealist have stated his ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... They gave more promise, certainly, of efficient service, should danger arise, than could be expected of the superannuated Trojans chief of Priam's court, as their catalogue is translated by Pope from the living record of Homer:— ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous

... of plant-raising which dispense with plough and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how truly in this kind of farming the ox is ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... day of the month, the Colonel was cared for as a friend, and exhibited as a phenomenon. Seven photographers disputed the possession of so precious a sitter. The cities of Greece did no more for our poor old Homer. His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, wished to see him in propria persona, and begged Herr Hirtz to bring him to the palace. Fougas scratched his ear a little, and intimated that a soldier ought not to associate with the enemy, seeming to think ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About

... collection of essays by Samuel Butler, which was originally published by Mr. Grant Richards in 1904 under the title Essays on Life, Art and Science, and reissued by Mr. Fifield in 1908. To these are now added another essay, entitled "The Humour of Homer," a biographical sketch of the author kindly contributed by Mr. Henry Festing Jones, which will add materially to the value of the edition, and a portrait in photogravure from a photograph taken in 1889—the period of ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... one in French literature, called things by their names, made poetry as Homer made it, with words that meant facts. He was a thief and a vagabond who wrote in the 'grand style' by daring to be sincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him, to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in his soul which perhaps matched ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... first Crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness {71} and power. The Faery Queene, too, was a tale of knight-errantry. Its hero was King ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... in a style of luminous simplicity—it was a feat that demanded, that betokened, the genius of Tolstoy. War and Peace is like an Iliad, the story of certain men, and an Aeneid, the story of a nation, compressed into one book by a man who never so much as noticed that he was Homer and ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock

... their events, their characters, their relations, as if they were to continue for centuries. His remarks are such as the simplest form of human affairs gives birth to; he laments the instability of earthly fortune, as Homer notes our common mortality, or in the tone of that beautiful dialogue between Solon and Croesus, when the philosopher assured the king, that to be rich was not necessarily to be happy. But, resembling Herodotus in his simple morality, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... better perhaps than any other work in literature. Ireland had at hand all the materials for a great national epic, a wealth of saga-material replete with interesting episodes, picturesque and dramatic incidents and strongly defined personages, yet she never found her Homer, a gifted poet to embrace her entire literary wealth, to piece the disjointed fragments together, smooth the asperities and hand down to posterity the finished epic of the Celtic world, superior, perhaps, to the Iliad or the Odyssey. What has come down to us is "a sort of patchwork ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown

... threaten or let duty call, And self surrenders to the needs of all; Incurs vast perils, or, to save those dear, Embraces death without one sigh or tear. Life's martyrs still the endless drama play Though no great Homer lives to chant their ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... the Vampire is generally called in Greece by a name of Slavonic extraction; for in the islands, which were, he says, little if at all affected by Slavonic influences, the Vampire bears a thoroughly Hellenic designation.[417] But the thirst for blood attributed by Homer to his shadowy ghosts seems to have been of a different nature from that evinced by the material Vampire of modern days, nor does that ghastly revenant seem by any means fully to correspond to such ghostly destroyers as the spirit ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... formation of a taste by which literature is to be judged and relished. Even those who never acquire any very competent knowledge of, or love for pictures, do acquire a respect for art, connect it with classical poetry—the highest poetry, with Homer, with the Greek drama, with all they have read of the venerated works of Phidias, Praxiteles, and Apelles; and having no too nice discrimination, are credulous of, or anticipate by remembering what has been done and valued—the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... love with you. I like every thing that belongs to you; I feel as if they brought me nearer to yourself. She and your sister send you a thousand loves, and your brother also, who supped here this evening. They talked a great deal of Homer, Greek, Latin, &c. My dear aunt and uncle were delighted with him, and think him very clever. It is now midnight. I am in my couch—my solitary couch—far from thee. Alas! nothing which you see where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... spring's pink cheeks were sheltered by soft, gray fur. We look up at these fleecy clusters, freed from the brownish budscales, with a far background of bluest sky, and think that it must have been such a grove as this to which the Princess Nausicca sent Ulysses to wait for her, described by Homer as "a beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... had appeared to me very unhappy, yet I now remembered them with regret. The hours were fled when I could read my Bible, and Homer, from whom I had imbibed such a passionate admiration of his glorious language. Oh, how it irked me to be unable to prosecute my study of him! And there were Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Byron, Walter Scott, Schiller, Goethe, &c.— how many friends, how many innocent and ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico

... To a Friend, praising Homer and Epictetus and Sophocles, for it seems to some to have a smatch of priggishness. Nor am I one of those who think very highly of the much longer Sick King in Bokhara which (with a fragment of an Antigone, whereof more hereafter) follows, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... lines, and the opening lines of the poem are among the best of Tennyson's blank verse lines, and therefore among the best that English poetry contains. The description owes some of its beauty to Homer. In its earlier form, in the volume of 1832-3, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... [Mr. Breese] on the birth of a grandson.... As to the child, I saw him asleep, so can say nothing of his eye or his genius peeing through it. He may have the sagacity of a Jewish rabbi, or the profundity of a Calvin, or the sublimity of a Homer for aught I know. But time ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse

... another would cry, "Meares,"—then uproar. It was impossible for Ponting to speak. We had a milk punch, when Scott proposed the Eastern Party, and Clissold, the cook, proposed Good Old True Milk. Titus blew away the ball of his gun. "I blew it into the cerulean—how doth Homer have it?—cerulean azure—hence Erebus." As we turned in he said, "Cherry, are you responsible for your actions?" and when I said Yes, he blew loudly on his whistle, and the last thing I remembered was ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... grief, And wept the North that could not find relief. Then madness joined its harshest tone to strife: A minor note swelled in the song of life Till, stirring with the love that filled his breast, But still, unflinching at the Right's behest Grave Lincoln came, strong-handed, from afar,— The mighty Homer of the lyre of war! 'Twas he who bade the raging tempest cease, Wrenched from his strings the harmony of peace, Muted the strings that made the discord,—Wrong, And gave his spirit up in thund'rous song. Oh, mighty Master of the mighty ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus among the schoolmen; Leo I. and Gregory VII. among the popes; Luther and Calvin in the line of Protestant reformers and divines; Socrates, the patriarch of the ancient schools of philosophy; Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton, Goethe and Schiller in the history of poetry, among the various nations to which they belong; Raphael among painters; Charlemagne, the first and greatest in the long succession of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... founders of Athens; the other, of Sparta. Besides these two main tribes, the Aeolians occupied Thessaly, Boeotia, Aetolia, and other districts. To them the Achaeans, who were supreme in Peloponnesus in the days of Homer, were allied. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... which the Chansons arose were truly parallel to the conditions under which the Homeric poems arose, and the poems, French and Achaean, are also true parallels, except in genius. The French have no Homer: cared vate sacro. It follows that a Homer was necessary to the evolution ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... Edinburgh, with his mind largely stored with border legends, chiefly derived from the recitations of his grandmother, a person of a romantic inclination and sprightly intelligence. At this period, Pope's translation of Homer, and the more amusing songs in Ramsay's "Evergreen," were his favourite studies; and he took delight in reading aloud, with suitable emphasis, the more striking passages, or verses, to his mother, who sought ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... lay at his feet. Yes, he'd have recognised it anywhere, even without help of the half-effaced "J. F." painted on its canvas cover. It was a far-travelled piece of luggage, and much-enduring—What are those adjectives by which Homer is always calling Ulysses? . . . It bore many labels. One, with "Southampton" upon it, was apparently pretty recent . . . and another ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... and the remarks about "specific" diseases, the answer, if any is necessary, seems very simple. An inflammation of a serous membrane may give rise to secretions which act as a poison, whether that be a "specific" poison or not, as Dr. Homer has told his young readers, and as dissectors know too well; and that poison may produce its symptoms in a few hours after the system has received it, as any may see in Druitt's "Surgery," if they care to look. Puerperal peritonitis may produce such a poison, and puerperal women ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... faiths. Dr. Oldenberg is (i. 209) one of several 'very thoughtful scholars' who do so, who break Mr. Max Muller's prohibition. Yet (ii. 220) 'no true scholar would accept any comparison' between savage fables and the folklore of Homer and the Vedas 'as really authoritative until fully demonstrated on both sides.' Well, it is 'fully demonstrated,' or 'a very thoughtful scholar' (like Dr. Oldenberg) would not accept it. Or it is not demonstrated, and then Dr. Oldenberg, though 'a very thoughtful,' ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... and West have been decorated by the pencil of St. Luke; and the Evangelist, who was perhaps a physician, has been forced to exercise the occupation of a painter, so profane and odious in the eyes of the primitive Christians. The Olympian Jove, created by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last degeneracy ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... other, reading Shakespeare did not appeal to my disordered mind. I tried Hamlet and Julius Caesar once or twice, and gave it up, after telling a man who asked "Shah-kay-spare, who is Shah-kay-spare?" that Mr. S. was the Homer of the English-speaking peoples—which remark, to my surprise, appeared to convey a very definite idea to the questioner and sent him away perfectly satisfied. Most of the timeless time I spent promenading in the rain and sleet with Jean ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... ff.). No doubt in this idea of cycles Plato is influenced by the popular thought of his time: this feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age in the past was deeply rooted in Greek mythology. We get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and there are similar touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever they recover it they will lose it again. And with Plato this dread is reinforced by his sense of something incurable in the world, the thwarting ...
— Progress and History • Various

... to his wife his rank and his wealth; always the wife possesses a dignified place and much influence. Even the formal elevation of women to positions of authority is not uncommon. "There is nothing," says Homer, "better and nobler than when husband and wife, being of one mind, rule a household. Penelope and Clytemnestra were left in charge of the realms of their husbands during their absence in Troy; the beautiful Chloris ruled as queen in Pylos. Arete, the beloved wife ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... year what they can accomplish: (1) higher education made Prussia win; (2) secondary education, bourgeois, produced the men of the 4th of September; (3) primary education gave us the Commune. Its minister of public instruction was the great Valles, who boasted that he scorned Homer! ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... curious account of the ancient manner of fowling. The nets (for nephea is used in that sense by Aristophanes) were spread on a plain; on an adjoining rising ground were stationed they who had charge of the vultures (such Homer calls them) which were trained to the sport. The alarm being given to the birds below, the vultures were loosed, when if any of them escaped their talons, the nets were ready to enclose ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... Iowa State University despatched to Laysan a scientific expedition in charge of Prof. Homer R. Dill. The party landed on the island on April 24 and remained until June 5, and the report of Professor Dill (U.S. Department of Agriculture) is consumedly interesting to the friends of birds. Here is what he has said ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... when in prance the village selectmen followed by the deacons of the church. When they came into view I knew the bell had rung on Sabrina, the souse. They all came in looking like the first act of a funeral, and Homer Jenkins, the head deaconorine, looked real solemn, and said, 'We regret to inform you that we have found it our painful duty to dismiss your daughter from the church.' I spoke up real gay like and said, 'Go as far as you like, I never ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey

... scholar, but my predecessor at the school-house had a way of sneering at him that was as good as sarcasm. When they were on their legs at the same time, asking each other passionately to be calm, and rolling out lines from Homer, that made the inn-keeper look fearfully to the fastenings of the door, their heads very nearly came together although the table was between them. The old dominie had an advantage in being the shorter man, for he could hammer on the table as he spoke, while ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie

... For Hellenic or Xenophontine or old-world theory of the misfortunes which befall the virtuous, vide Homer, vide Book of Job (Satan), ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon

... Their histories smack of legend. And this, of course, is natural, for they had been in the world, had loved and suffered, so long before us that they seem a part of that antenatal mystery out of which we sprang. When they speak of their old love-stories, it is as though we were reading Homer. It sounds so long ago. We are surprised at the vividness with which they recall happenings and personalities, past and gone before, as they tell us, we were born. Before we were born! Yes! They belong to that mysterious epoch of time—"before we were born"; and ...
— Different Girls • Various

... profane learning of the day—all study of the ancient heathen philosophers and poets. The gods of Olympus became synonymous with demons and monsters of the Christian hell, as we see in Dante and in such old legends as that of the Hill of Venus. Plato and Aristotle, and even Homer, were put on the index. Virgil especially was regarded as a dangerous wizard—although in another age he was honoured almost as a prophet and a foreteller of the Messiah. I remember that many years ago, when I was searching for Virgil's tomb on Posilipo near Naples, I was ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... or that my particular kind of labour had something more objectionable about it than any other? In old times it was the most honourable office there was. Look at the priests of the Old Testament! Read Homer!" ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... Tradescant, grandsire, father, son; The last dy'd in his spring; the other two Liv'd till they had travell'd Art and Nature through, As by their choice collections may appear, Of what is rare, in land, in sea, in air; Whilst they (as Homer's Iliad in a nut) A world of wonders in one closet shut; These famous antiquarians that had been Both Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen, Transplanted now themselves, sleep here; and when Angels shall with their trumpets waken men, And fire shall purge ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 79, May 3, 1851 • Various

... orations of Isaeus; of the three hundred and ninety-one speeches of Lysias; of the hundred and eighty treatises of Theophrastus; of the eighth book of the conic sections of Apollonius; of Pindar's hymns and dithyrambics; and of the five and forty tragedies of Homer Junior. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... indeed well calculated to awaken the higher and finer feelings of our nature. It is not wanting in its enthusiasm and its poetry. The relations of the most beloved and honored chief, and the most faithful and admiring subjects, which, from the time of Homer, have been the theme of song, are frigid and unfelt compared with those existing between the master and his slaves—who served his father, and rocked his cradle, or have been born in his household, and look forward to serve his children—who have been through life the props of his fortune, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... Greece, Lacedaemon, considering that Lycurgus their lawgiver was so addicted to elegant learning, as to have been the first that brought out of Ionia the scattered works of Homer, and sent the poet Thales from Crete to prepare and mollify the Spartan surliness with his smooth songs and odes, the better to plant among them law and civility, it is to be wondered how museless and unbookish they were, minding nought ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton

... has conferred on him the king's ring, an instance more ancient than Prometheus, whom fables call the inventor of the ring. Therefore let those who will hold, with Pliny and his followers, that its use is more recent than Homer. The Greeks seem to have derived the custom of wearing it from the East, and Italy from the Greeks. Juvenal and Persius refer to {417} rings which were worn only on birthdays. Clemens Alexandrinus recommends a limit within which the liberty ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... two to three thousand years older than "Macbeth," and yet it is as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. We have there no lessons save in the emotions which rise in us as we read. Homer had no philosophy; he never struggles to press upon us his views about this or that; you can scarcely tell, indeed, whether his sympathies are Greek or Trojan: but he represents to us faithfully the men and women among ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... Great Homer sings his epic high; The hero fronts his dangers; The brave his duty still doth ply— And did it while, I won't deny, Philosophers were strangers: But grant by heart and brain achiev'd What Locke and Des Cartes ne'er conceiv'd— By them yet, as ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald

... will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly by way of precept, or sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises." He thought that Homer and Virgil and Ariosto had thus written poetry, to teach the world moral virtue and political wisdom. He attempted to propitiate Lord Burghley, who hated him and his verses, by setting before him in a dedication sonnet, the true ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast; and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus in the Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts, over the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... Cyprus was a centre of Phoenician enterprise. And, as we are told in that fine work 'Kypros, the Bible, and Homer: Oriental Civilisation, Art and Religion in ancient times,' "The oldest extant Phoenician inscriptions, themselves the earliest examples of letters properly so called, ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons

... contra confessionem Saxonicam, et parui." (Koellner, 407.) July 10 Brenz wrote to Myconius: "Their leader (antesignanus) is that good man Eck. The rest are 23 in number. One might call them an Iliad [Homer's Iliad consists of 24 books] of sophists." (C. R. 2, 180.) Melanchthon, too, repeatedly designates Eck and Faber as the authors of the Confutation. July 14 he wrote to Luther: "With his legerdemain (commanipulatione) Eck presented to the Emperor the Confutation of our Confession." (193.) August ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... one of the Heathen Gods; Iupiter's Grandfather. You may read a particular Account of him my dear, in Homer, or Milton, or any of the Greek Poets (pulls out a Bill of the Farce) well I vow its a Whimsicall Bill this; a charming Puff. Lud where's Sir Conjecture? I suppose he can give us a particular Account of it. for ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin

... the beginning of April, 185-, that the excitement occasioned by the published accounts of the Victoria "Diggings," induced my brother to fling aside his Homer and Euclid for the various "Guides" printed for the benefit of the intending gold-seeker, or to ponder over the shipping columns of the daily papers. The love of adventure must be contagious, for three ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey

... cannot grasp the fullness of the system by which the old Polynesian chiefs and priests, totally without letters, or even ideographs, except in Easter Island, kept the archives of the tribe and nation by frequent repetition of memorized annals. So we got Homer's Odyssey, and ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... be found upon examination to be pretty well acquainted with Virgil, Tully, and Horace. He is likewise able to construe any part of the Greek Testament. He parses and makes Latin rather better than common. He has been through the twelve first books of Homer, but, as 't is more than a year since he recited that author, am afraid he has lost the greater part of what he then understood pretty well. In Arithmetic, vulgar and decimal, he is well versed. I have likewise taught him Trigonometry, Altimetry, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... 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 ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse

... church in which Calvert, the founder of Maryland, was baptized, of course before he turned Catholic, since it could not very well have been afterwards. At the moment, however, I did not think of this. I had enough to do with the fact that Chapman, the translator of Homer, was buried in that church, and Andrew Marvell, the poet, and that very wicked Countess of Shrewsbury, the terrible she who held the Duke of Buckingham's horse while he was killing her husband in a duel. I should, no doubt, have seen ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... and had now, for some years, been living with his sister in his fine, large house,—rich and well educated, devoting his life to study, works of benevolence, to general reform and progress. It was he who had the first anti-slavery lecture delivered in the town, and actually persuaded Mr. Homer, the old minister, to let Mr. Garrison stand in the pulpit on a Wednesday night and preach deliverance unto the captives; but it could be done only once, for the clergymen of the neighborhood thought anti-slavery a desecration of their new wooden meeting-houses. It was he, too, who asked Lucy Stone ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker

... not remarkable that Virgil failed to make acknowledgment to Varro in the Georgics when he failed to make acknowledgment to Homer in the Aeneid. See Petrarch's Epistle to Homer for a loyal but vain attempt to ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... world shown him at lunch-time, a world capable of existing—there was no doubt about that—but so unnecessary, such a thing to believe in— Shaw and Wells and the serious sixpenny weeklies! What were they after, scrubbing and demolishing, these elderly people? Had they never read Homer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined against the feelings he drew from youth and natural inclination. The poor devils had rigged up this meagre object. Yet something of pity was in ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... entered college that Fall. I had coached him, in such hours as I could spare. He was conscientious enough, though his Greek was not the Greek of Homer and he vexed the soul of my mother with a French she said ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... powers"[B] of English? I think with him that it was hard to speak of our language as one which "transforms boos megaloio boeien into 'great ox's hide.'" Such phrases as 'The Lord is a man of war,' 'The trumpet spake not to the armed throng,' are to my ear quite as grand as Homer: and it would be equally fair to ask what we are to make of a language which transforms Milton's line into [Greek: e shalpigx ohy proshephe ton hoplismhenon hochlon.][C] But be this as it may, these phenomena ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus

... mother's knee. His father, the "perfectly honest wine-merchant," seems to have been the one to foster the boy's aesthetic sense; he was in the habit of reading aloud to his little family, and his son's apparently genuine appreciation of Scott, Pope, and Homer dates from the incredibly early age of five. It was his father, also, to whom he owed his early acquaintance with the finest landscape, for the boy was his companion in yearly business trips about Britain, and later visited, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... old Homer, the blind son of Scio's isle, was the inspiration of Samian wine; and good old Noah, too, would have sung some good and merry song, from the inspiration of the juice of the vine he planted, but having to wait so long, his ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... were published in book form. Not only was Lowell's name not yet connected publicly with the Yankee humor, but the poems were provided with an elaborate introduction, notes and comments, by the learned pastor of the church at Jaalam, Homer Wilbur. His notes and introduction are filled with Latin quotations, and he appears as much a scholar as Hosea Biglow does a natural. He says he tried to teach Hosea better English, but decided to let him work out his own ideas in his own way. Still, he endorses ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody

... sonnets, can be found in the works of almost every poet of note, whether English or American. Under the head of epic or narrative poetry are included long productions like the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer and the Paradise Lost of Milton, and shorter poems, such as Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Longfellow's Evangeline. Indeed, every piece of verse that tells a story, however short it may be, belongs with the epics or narratives. Dramatic poetry includes ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various

... Mr. Tumulty, the President's Secretary, brought to the Shoreham Hotel in Washington an appeal to the country for a Democratic Congress and read it to several Democrats gathered there for the purpose, including Homer S. Cummings, who, by that time, had become acting Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and was in charge of the campaign. Mr. Cummings doubted the wisdom of an appeal, couched in such terms ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous



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