"Homeric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... British history than the subject; and it is one which Chatterton, with all his genius, was much too young to treat in a manner at all approaching to epic completeness. Yet a few specimens might show that he is not deficient in the energy of the Homeric poetry of action. But here is metal more attractive, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... who indulged in bold and independent speculations, and suffered much persecution for his ridicule of the Homeric deities. He flourished at the time of our history and lived to a great age, far on into the fifth century. We have quoted some fragments of his writings above. He committed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... It is a specimen of composition handed down by tradition, but not a tradition itself. It is an unwritten record—as much a record in form and nature as a written document, but differing from a written document in the manner of its transmission to posterity. Many a good judge believes that the Homeric poems are older than the art of writing, and, consequently, that they were handed down to posterity orally. Yet no one would say that the Iliad and ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... In the hexameter line of Homer there are usually about thirty letters, of which only twelve are consonants; in the English hexameter there are often sixty letters, of which nearly forty are consonants. And the Homeric hexameter will have six words where the English hexameter has twelve or fourteen.[1] Yet having set himself this utterly hopeless and thankless task, to write English hexameter, Kingsley produced some five hundred lines of Andromeda, which in rhythm, ease, rapidity, and metrical ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... his poisons and charms. The curious attempt to distinguish smiths into good and useful swordsmiths and base and bad goldsmiths seems a merely modern explanation: Weland could both forge swords and make ornaments of metal. Starcad's loathing for a smith recalls the mockery with which the Homeric gods treat Hephaistos. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... golden woodlands Of tulip and hickory; On the open ridge behind it You may mount to a glimpse of sea,— The far-off, blue, Homeric Rim of the world's great shield, A border of boundless glamor For the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Lady Charlotte trotting back for another smack in the face of her enemy,—a third rounding of her Troy with the vanquished dead at her heels, as Weyburn let a flimsy suggestion beguile his fancy, until the Homeric was overwhelming even to a playful mind, and he put her in a mediaeval frame. She really had the heroical aspect in a grandiose-grotesque, fitted to some lines of Ariosto. Her head wore a close hood, disclosing a fringe of grey locks, owlish to see about features hooked ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and proud of his numerous scars, was telling of foreign, domestic, and all kinds of Homeric wars. His hearers were standing before him in attitudes speaking of awe, for what could they do but adore him, the ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... closer sympathy with the masters of practical affairs than with artists in stone like Phidias or artists in thought like Plato. The true explanation of Shakespeare's caricatures of Greek life, whether Homeric or Athenian, is to be found in the fact that he was not only entirely ignorant of it but prejudiced against it. And this prejudice in him had an obvious root. Chapman had just translated and published the first books of his Iliad, and Chapman was the poet whom Shakespeare speaks of ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... when there is no chance of either proving or disproving a case I dare say one man's word answers quite as well as another's. At all events, we have your grandfather's testimony as chief actor and eye-witness against the inherited convictions of our somewhat Homeric young neighbour. For eighteen years before the war Mr. Fletcher was sole agent—a queer selection, certainly—for old Mr. Blake, who was known to have grown very careless in the confidence he placed. When the crash came, about three years after the war, the old gentleman's mind was much enfeebled, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... parts with so much skill and truth that no one could have wished for anything more beautiful; I was delighted with that portrait; it was a speaking likeness, and I wrote under it, "O-Morphi," not a Homeric word, but a Greek one after all, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... over and over again, with unflagging vehemence, with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. La recherche du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en saveur, la surabondance des vocables puises a toutes ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the skirts of his garments." The Assyrian kings intertwined gold thread with their fine beards—and, judging from mural sculptures, curling tongs must have been in considerable demand with them. In ancient Greece the beard was universally worn, and it is related of Zoilus, the founder of the anti-Homeric school, that he shaved the crown of his head, in order that all the virtue should go to the nourishment of his beard. Persius could not think of a more complimentary epithet to apply to Socrates than that of "Magistrum Barbatum," or Bearded Master—the ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... attack; the "heavy chariots" were heavier, and designed for purposes of defense. Li Ch'uan, it is true, says that the latter were light, but this seems hardly probable. It is interesting to note the analogies between early Chinese warfare and that of the Homeric Greeks. In each case, the war- chariot was the important factor, forming as it did the nucleus round which was grouped a certain number of foot-soldiers. With regard to the numbers given here, we are informed that each swift chariot was accompanied by 75 footmen, and each ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... have read of a man who, being by his ignorance of Greek compelled to gratify his curiosity with the Latin printed on the opposite page, declared that from the rude simplicity of the lines literally rendered he formed nobler ideas of the Homeric majesty than from the laboured elegance of polished versions. Those literal translations were always at hand, and from them he could easily obtain his author's sense with sufficient certainty and among the readers of Homer the number is very ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... hungry. I could eat a whole ox, like the Homeric hero, but I shall have to content myself with a piece of hard bread. Don't you know that a man can't live all the time on bread alone? I want to ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... and stood well to the front of controversy in Julian's days. When the rescript came out which forbade the Galileans to teach the classics, they promptly undertook to form a Christian literature by throwing Scripture into classical forms. The Old Testament was turned into Homeric verse, the New into Platonic dialogues. Here again Apollinarius was premature. There was indeed no reason why Christianity should not have as good a literature as heathenism, but it would have to be a growth of many ages. In doctrine Apollinarius was ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... was recognised and reserve power of the man fully felt. Like every Achilles, Gladstone was held by the heel when dipped. One may well feel that he came short as a theologian. The scholars slight his Homeric disquisitions. Consistency was a virtue which he probably too often scouted, but his high purpose, his spotlessness of spirit, and strong control of men no one can gainsay. In the slang of the street of that time he was the "G.O.M.," the Grand Old Man as well to those who fought him as to ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... the gardener who arranges things so conveniently for them?"[74] This is the notion which Voltaire himself three years afterwards illustrated in the witty fancies of Micromegas. The little animalcule in the square cap, who makes the giant laugh in a Homeric manner by its inflated account of itself as the final cause of the universe, is the type of the philosophy on which ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... shoulders of the Irishman—who, in all likelihood, had performed the role of wheeling it from Fort Smith to the Big Timbers, and was expected to push it before him to the edge of the Pacific Ocean! It was evident that Patrick was tired of his task: for they had not made much progress in their Homeric supper, before he once ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... religions of the widely extended Aryan or Indo-European race, to which we ourselves belong, we shall find in the earlier writings of the Hindus an exhibition of it decidedly more archaic even than that which is presented in the Homeric poems. Then, the growth—the historical development—of Hinduism is not less worthy of attention than its earlier phases. It has endured for upward of three thousand years, no doubt undergoing very important changes, yet in many things retaining its original spirit. The progress ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... one dynasty of gods had passed over the golden stage of Olympus, had made their exit, and were hurrying onward to oblivion. It was matter of notoriety, also, that all these gods were and had been liable to the taint of sorrow for the death of their earthly children, (as the Homeric Jupiter for Sarpedon, Thetis for Achilles, Calliope, in Euripides, for her blooming Rhesus;) all were liable to fear; all to physical pain; all to anxiety; all to the indefinite menaces of a danger not ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... delight in good letters, and in nature. He died young; he was one of those whose talent matures slowly, and he died before he came into the full possession of his intellectual kingdom. He had the ambition to excel, [Greek text], as the Homeric motto of his University runs, and he was on the way to excellence when his health broke down. He lingered for two ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... us, full of dwellings and painless, and give us protection."[60] In the burial service the dead are exhorted to "go into kindly mother earth" who will be "wool-soft, like a maiden."[61] The one hymn to Earth should perhaps be placed parallel with similar meditative and perfunctory laudations in the Homeric hymns: ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... other." Later on Odysseus has his adventure with the Sirens, who are always "casting a spell of penetrating song, sitting within a meadow," in order to decoy passing sailors. Charybdis is another divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin. The island nymph Calypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, until after seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home "because the nymph pleased him no more." ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... which, and not till which, he did give it them: in liberal dose; and quite blew them off the ground, for that day. From all which, one has to infer, That the mutual salutation by hat was probably a fact; that, for certain, there was some slight preliminary talk and gesticulation, but in the Homeric style, by no means in the Espagnac-French,—not chivalrous epigram at all, mere rough banter, and what is called "chaffing;"—and in short, that the French Mess-rooms (with their eloquent talent that way) had rounded off the thing into ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... look upon, and enchants by her sweet singing, but her womb is loathsome. Now, Dante does not call her one of the Sirens carelessly, any more than he speaks of Charybdis carelessly; and though he had got at the meaning of the Homeric fable only through Virgil's obscure tradition of it, the clue he has given us is quite enough. Bacon's interpretation, "the Sirens, or pleasures," which has become universal since his time, is ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... what Sidney Lanier said of Walt Whitman's poetry, they are raw collops slashed from the rump of Nature, and never mind the gristle. Likewise some of the strong adjectives and nouns have been softened,—Jonahed, as George Meredith would have said. There is, however, a Homeric quality about the cowboy's profanity and vulgarity that pleases rather than repulses. The broad sky under which he slept, the limitless plains over which he rode, the big, open, free life he lived near to Nature's breast, taught him simplicity, ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... Such a separation was imagined by comparatively undeveloped peoples whose ethical principle was chiefly ritualistic, as, for example, the Fijians, the American Indians, and by civilized peoples in their early stages, the Vedic Hindus[170] (Yama's abode in the sky, and a pit) and the Greeks (the Homeric ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... so divine!—the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, "hyacinthine!" I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose—and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... its share of religious ceremonial, and the Sibylline books, which had hitherto been, in theory at least, merely an alternative method of religious procedure permitted to exist alongside of the older and more conservative forms, became now the order of the day. Like a Homeric picture in which the quarrels of the gods in Olympus run parallel to the battles of Greeks and Trojans on the plains of Troy, so every victory which Rome won over Hannibal on the field of battle was bought at ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... knowledge, indeed, such as lies beyond the bounds of actual experience, was extremely limited, but when life was singularly fresh, vivid, and expansive. The only poems of Homer we possess are the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," for the Homeric hymns and other productions lose all title to stand in line with these wonderful works, by reason of conflict in a multitude of particulars with the witness of the text, as well as of their poetical inferiority. They evidently belong to the period that follows ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a man or woman who was like the gods; and who, from that likeness, stood superior to his or her fellow-creatures. Gods, heroes, and men, is a threefold division of rational beings, with which we ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... student cannot say a priori what country you refer to, what race you have in your thoughts. It may be Florida, as Florida was when first discovered; it may be Zululand, or West Africa, or ancient Rome, or Homeric Greece, or Palestine. In all these, and many other regions, the sneeze was welcomed as an auspicious omen. The little superstition is as widely distributed as the flint arrow-heads. Just as the object and use of the arrow-heads became intelligible when we found similar ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... From Homeric warfare to subterranean conflict of modern trenches is a far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of this grim "revue" lacks ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... mellifluous word expresses it in Homer);—excepting this, it has no look, no air, of a translation. It is as truly an original poem as the 'Faery Queene';—it will give you small idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or Cowper's cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet,—as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Virgil, I have been writing a 'Romance of the Ganges,'[34] in order to illustrate an engraving in the new annual to be edited by Miss Mitford, Finden's tableaux for 1838. It does not sound a very Homeric undertaking—I confess I don't hold any kind of annual, gild it as you please, in too much honour and awe—but from my wish to please her, and from the necessity of its being done in a certain time, I was 'quite frightful,' as poor old Cooke used to say, in order to express his own nervousness. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... otherwise, and each time the duel had been interrupted in its formal inception, and had gone no further than that spirited prologue in which the female sex so faithfully preserve the tradition of those thundering dialogues which invariably precede the manual business of the Homeric fray. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and hyacinth; and the dainty Metamorphoses of Ovid [12] are but a fossilised form of one morsel here and there, from a whole world of transformation, with which their nimble fancy was perpetually playing. "Together with them," says the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, of the Hamadryads, the nymphs which animate the forest trees, "with them, at the moment of their birth, grew up out of the soil, oak-tree or pine, fair, flourishing among the mountains. And when at last the appointed ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... cried the old Homeric hero of Janina, leaping with joy; and his words, passing from mouth to mouth, spread yet more terror amid Kursheed's soldiers, already overwhelmed by the horrible ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... comprising, besides, the Syrians, Jews, Arabians, and in part the Abyssinians. They were at a very early period a trading and mercantile nation, and the variegated robes and golden ornaments fabricated at Sidon were prized by the Homeric heroes. They habitually traversed the AEgean Sea, and formed settlements on ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... book. It was the Galactic reaction to the book. Already feeling inferior because of the stand-offish attitude of the beings from the stars, the Homeric laughter of those same beings had been too much. It would have been bad enough if that laughter had been generated by one of the Galactics. To have had it generated by an Earthman made it that much worse. Against an Earthman, their rage ...
— A World by the Tale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... preceding poor Tom's doomed appearance before the magistrate, Dame Bakewell had an interview with Austin, who went to Raynham immediately, and sought Adrian's counsel upon what was to be done. Homeric laughter and nothing else could be got out of Adrian when he heard of the doings of these desperate boys: how they had entered Dame Bakewell's smallest of retail shops, and purchased tea, sugar, candles, and comfits of every description, till the shop was clear of customers: how they had then ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Yemen, and to refer to the labours in reference to the idioms and antiquities of Arabia of the French consul at Djedda, Fulgence Fresnel. He was the first, in his letters on the history of the Arabs before Islamism, published in 1836, to explain the Himyarite or Homeric language and to recognize that it resembles rather the early Hebrew and Syriac dialects, than the Arabic of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... appointed it, and so it was; the map was correct enough, but could not, like Homer, convey the whole truth. Thus vain and false are the mere human surmises and doubts which clash with Homeric writ! ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... just the vorspiel. Mother Nature must have fed color to Healy. He did not paint, play nor write, but the rest of that curse dropped with raw pigment, like a painting of Sorolla. Prisms of English flashed with terrible attraction. It was a Homeric curse of all nations. Parts of it were dainty, too, as a butterfly dip. Cairns was hot and courageous under the spell. The whole train of mules huddled and fell to trembling. A three-legged pariah-dog sniffed, took on a sudden ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... true, one imagines one sees certain periods and landmarks, but in the next page all is chaos again. It may be difficult to confess that with all the traditions of the early migrations of Cecrops and Danaus into Greece, with the Homeric poems of the Trojan war, and the genealogies of the ancient dynasties of Greece, we know nothing of Greek history before the Olympiads, and very little even then. Yet the true historian does not allow himself to indulge in any illusions on this subject, and he shuts his ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... the subject of Indian poetry; chiefly those of the Schlegels, of Bopp, and of De Chezy. I was struck with the singularity and captivated by the extreme beauty, as it appeared to me, of some of the extracts, especially those from the great epic poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, in their Homeric simplicity so totally opposite to the ordinary notions entertained of all eastern poetry. I was induced to attempt, without any instruction, and with the few elementary works which could be procured, the Grammars of Wilkins and Bopp, the Glossaries of Bopp and ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... melancholy expression upon the beautiful form: never had he before so gazed upon a woman. Her countenance was extraordinarily fine, her nose and forehead nobly formed, the eyebrows dark, and in the dark-blue eyes lay something pensive, yet happy: one might employ the Homeric expression, "smiling through tears," to describe this look. She announced that the ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... The story of his intimacy with Herodotus is probably due to the fact that he imitated him and had recourse to his history for the incidents of his poem. The Perseis was at first highly successful and was said to have been read, together with the Homeric poems, at the Panathenaea, but later critics reversed this favourable judgment. Aristotle (Topica, viii. 1) calls Choerilus's comparisons far-fetched and obscure, and the Alexandrians displaced him by Antimachus in the canon of epic poets. The ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... The idea that man has risen is considered base, degrading, and positively wicked; the idea that he has fallen is considered to be immensely inspiring, ennobling, and beautiful. For myself, I have somehow always preferred the boast of the Homeric Glaucus that we indeed maintain ourselves to be much better men than ever were ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... matter. Professor Murray prefers to believe in a myth growing out of the strife of light and darkness in the sky: but the rape of beautiful girls by seafaring rovers was evidently common enough in those times, so why should not the Homeric version be right? We can always be sure that the old poems represent accurately life, manners, and character; and from the analogy of those legends whose origin is known, we may fairly infer that the root of a famous story, divine or human, is first planted in fact, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... to tell me a girl did it?" He threw back his head in a roar of Homeric laughter. "Ever hear the beat of that? A damn li'l' Injun squaw playin' her tricks on Bully West! If she was mine I'd tickle her back ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... another. (25) Caesar performed the solemn rites of the great Latin festival on the Alban Mount during his Dictatorship. (Compare Book VII., line 471.) (26) Dyrrhachium was founded by the Corcyreams, with whom the Homeric Phaeacians have been identified. (27) Apparently making the Danube discharge into the Sea of Azov. See Mr. Heitland's Introduction, p. 53. (28) At the foot of the Acroceraunian range. (29) Caesar himself ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... a great favourite with our statesmen and, indeed, may be said to be almost a factor in our political life. For as the cross-benches form a refuge for those who have no minds to make up, so those who cannot make up their minds always take to Homeric studies. Many of our leaders have sulked in their tents with Achilles after some violent political crisis and, enraged at the fickleness of fortune, more than one has given up to poetry what was obviously meant for party. It would be unjust, however, to regard Lord ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the late seventies, the winter before his passing, that one mild night I walked home from a meeting of the Goethe Club in company with the poet Bryant. He and my father had been stanch comrades, and many a time had I studied his Homeric head silhouetted by firelight on our library wall. As we crossed the Park front going from Fifth Avenue east to west, he paused, and leaning on his cane gazed skyward, where the outlines of some buildings, in process of construction on Fifty-ninth Street, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... e. for nine. It is remarkable that so little notice has been taken of this story by the later poets. But the sacrifice of Iphigenia was a more attractive subject for tragedy or episode, and took the place of the Homeric legend.] ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... of by-gone times kept in significance by the perceiving, the imagining, and the sense of a flowing symbolism in Nature, which our own time brings to them. To make Homer alive to this age,—what an expenditure of imagination, of pure feeling and penetration does it demand! Let the Homeric heart or genius die out of mankind, and from that moment the "Iliad" is but dissonance, the long melodious roll of its echoes becomes a jarring chop of noises. What chiefly makes Homer great is the vast ideal breadth of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... whose martial renown has fired the world, whose daring and wonderful exploits have altered the boundaries of nations and changed the very face of the earth. To say nothing of the warriors of biblical history and Homeric verse, as the ages march along every great nation leaves us the glorious memory of some unique character, such as Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar. Even the wild hordes of northern Europe and the barbaric ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... himself principally with the site of Troy. Well versed in the Iliad, he sought for, and believed he identified, the various localities mentioned in the Homeric poem. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... for which I had covenanted—the only food, indeed, which the people had been able to offer at short notice—a stew of pork and potatoes. Pork (maiale) is the staple meat of all this region; viewing it as Homeric diet, I had often battened upon such flesh with moderate satisfaction. But the pork of Squillace defeated me; it smelt abominably, and it was tough as leather. No eggs were to be had no macaroni; cheese, yes—the familiar cacci ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... we get from Dr. Schliemann (interesting but fishy) about his excavations there in the far-off Homeric area, I notice cities, ruins, &c., as he digs them out of their graves, are certain to be in layers—that is to say, upon the foundation of an old concern, very far down indeed, is always another city or set of ruins, and upon that another superadded—and sometimes upon that ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... toward its favorite objects with an infectious and reckless ardor, whose wisdom is no child of slow prudence. We love Achilles more than Diomedes, and Ulysses not at all. But these are standards left over from a ruder state of society: we should have passed by this time the Homeric stage of mind—should have heroes suited to our age. Nay, we have erected different standards, and do make a different choice, when we see in any man fulfillment of our real ideals. Let a modern instance ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... the arms of Achilles to Thetis. The celebrated shield is supported by Vulcan on the anvil, and displayed to Thetis, who is seated, whilst a winged female figure standing at her side points out to her with a rod the marvels of its workmanship. Agreeably to the Homeric description the shield is encircled with the signs of the zodiac, and in the middle are the bear, the dragon, etc. On the ground are the breast-plate, the greaves ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... epic in cast and epic in proportion. Although, judged by the Homeric standard, it falls short in many respects of the complete form, yet it may without violence be called an epic. The central figure, Beowulf, a nobly conceived hero, possessing immense strength, unflinching courage, a never-swerving sense of honor, magnanimity, and generosity, the friend ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... syllable of a word, and this condition of things is still found in the earliest Sanskrit literature. But in Greek before historical times the accent had become limited to the last three syllables of a word, so that a long word like the Homeric genitive feromenoio could in no circumstances be accented on either of its first two syllables, while if the final syllable was long, as in the accusative plural feromenous, the accent could go back only to the second ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... entirely justified and wholesome antidote to the pompous and nauseous original. To Fielding's robust and masculine genius, says Mr Austin Dobson, "the strange conjunction of purity and precaution in Richardson's heroine was a thing unnatural and a theme for inextinguishable Homeric laughter." To Thackeray's sympathetic imagination the feud was the inevitable outcome of the difference between the two men. Fielding, he says "couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... replied Warner. "I read his book on the Indians of the Northern Mississippi Valley. Not merely their history and habits, but their legends, their folk lore, and the wonderful poetic glow so rich and fine that he threw over everything. There was something almost Homeric in his description of the great young Wyandot chieftain Timmendiquas or White Lightning, whom he acclaimed as the finest type of savage man the age ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... miller, they found themselves alone in the barn for a minute. The girls and Janet had gone to milk, and Hastings with them. There was a lantern in the barn, which showed Rachel in the swirl of the corn dust with which the barn was full, haloed and golden with it, like a Homeric goddess in a luminous cloud. Her soft brown head, her smile, showing the glint of her white teeth, her eyes, and all the beauty of her young form, in its semi-male dress—they set his blood on fire. Just as he was, in his khaki shirt-sleeves, he came to her, and ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the poet has reached a profounder consciousness of his art in his later poem; he has come to a knowledge of his constructive principle, and he takes the trouble to unfold the same at the beginning. To be sure, certain critics have assailed just this structural fact as not Homeric; without good grounds, in ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... on Translating Homer are open to not a few criticisms. In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases at least, demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold's strongest points, for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric compound adjectives, especially the stock ones—koruthaiolos, merops, and the rest. The originals, he is never weary of repeating, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... charity. Yet what system so vile but it has sometimes been gloriously misrepresented by its votaries? Who that ever read Edward Irving's 'Preface to Ben Ezra'—that modern Areopagitica—combining the essence of a hundred theological treatises with the spirit and grandeur of a Pindaric or Homeric ode—has forgot the pictures of Ben Ezra, or Lacunza the Jesuit? His work, 'The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty,' Irving translated from Spanish into his own noble English prose, and he describes the author as a man of primitive manners, ardent piety, and enormous erudition, and expresses ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Conquest of the Kingdom of Troy," ornamented with copperplates in the theatrical French taste. These pictures perverted my imagination to such a degree, that, for a long time, I could conceive the Homeric heroes only under such forms. The incidents themselves gave me unspeakable delight; though I found great fault with the work for affording us no account of the capture of Troy, and breaking off so abruptly with the death of Hector. My uncle, to whom I mentioned this ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... and Laertes, of which we read in Homeric song, and those of Babylon, were probably transcripts of Atlantis. "The sacred eminence in the midst of a 'superabundant, happy region figures more or less distinctly in almost every mythology, ancient or modern. It was the Mesomphalos of the earlier Greeks, and the Omphalium ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... his feet, after he had completed his Homeric repast, "this chile feels strong enuf to face the devil hisself, an' tharfor he needn't be backward 'bout the encounterin' o' a angel. So hyar goes to find out Frank Hamersley, an' how he's farin'. Anyhow, I'll take the deer along in case thar mout be ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... upon the scene. From this time their figures loom large in the foreground. Whatever else may be said of them they were bold men and there was something Homeric in their violence. Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and Jim, the first three were active in the wild events which followed their incumbency to power. California knew them in their boyhood, and during their manhood years ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... shall secure recreation and in what form he shall take it depends largely upon individual conditions. Mr. Gladstone found recreation not only in tree-cutting but in Homeric studies; Lord Salisbury finds it in chemistry; Washington found it in hunting; Wordsworth in walking; Carlyle in talking and smoking; Mr. Balfour finds it in golf, and Mr. Cleveland in fishing. Any pursuit or occupation which takes a man out of the atmosphere of his work-room ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... awkward one to the awkward. It was the loveliest hour of a fine day, the clear early evening, with the glow of the sunset in the air and a purple colour in the sea. I always thought that the waters ploughed by the Homeric heroes must have looked like that. I perceived on that particular occasion moreover that Grace Mavis would for the rest of the voyage be the most visible thing on the ship; the figure that would count most in the composition of groups. She ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... the true breath of humanity," says Renan, "and not literary merit, that constitutes the beautiful." An Homeric poem written to-day, he goes on to say, would not be beautiful, because it would not be true; it would not contain this breath of a living humanity. "It is not Homer who is beautiful, it is the Homeric life." The ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... panorama than a play, is founded on the Homeric story. Its scenes are laid in Olympus, in Hades, on Calypso's isle, and finally in Ithaca. Calypso tries to retain Ulysses ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... when money is useless. And there is another difficulty: justice, like the art of war or any other art, must be of opposites, good at attack as well as at defence, at stealing as well as at guarding. But then justice is a thief, though a hero notwithstanding, like Autolycus, the Homeric hero, who was 'excellent above all men in theft and perjury'—to such a pass have you and Homer and Simonides brought us; though I do not forget that the thieving must be for the good of friends and the harm of enemies. And still there arises another question: Are friends ...
— The Republic • Plato
... that naive poem of Nature, the product of the artistic impulse of the race to stamp its impressions in a beautiful and harmonious form, so in the clear-cut comparisons in Homer, the feeling for Nature is profound; but the Homeric hero had no personal relations with her, no conscious leaning towards her; the descriptions only served to frame human action, in time ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... burned several times to enlist. Tales of great movements shook the land. They might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them. He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all. His busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... mouth, but collapsed in a fit of retching, as from right and left, and from the darkness all around him, a roar of Homeric laughter woke the echoes of the Cove. Men rolled about laughing. Men leaned against one ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... think 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 ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... there was a feast after the Homeric fashion. A sheep was "cut," disembowelled, dismembered, tossed into one of our huge caldrons, and devoured within the hour: the almost live food [25] was washed down with huge draughts of milk. The feasters resembled Wordsworth's cows, "forty feeding like one:" in the left hand they held ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... fall into three classes: political, theological, and literary—the last including, and indeed chiefly consisting of, his books and articles upon Homer and the Homeric question. All the political writings, except his books on "The State in its Relations to the Church" and "Church Principles Considered in their Results," belong to the class of occasional literature, being pamphlets or articles produced ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... the Volsunga Saga men "fall," or are "slain," in a few cases of the more important deaths they are "pierced," or "cut in half," but except in the later Niebelungenlied version where Siegfried is pierced through the cross embroidered on his back, a touch which is essential to the plot, none of the Homeric detail as to the wounds appears. The same remark applies to the saga of Dietrich and indeed to most others; the only cases that I have noticed which resemble the Irish in detail are in the Icelandic Sagas (the Laxdale Saga and others), and even there the feature is not at all so prominent ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... repast that, with a man of Mr. Winthrop's means, might certainly betoken high thinking. However, the intellectual repast served to us reminded me of the feasts of the gods, or even better, in old Homeric times. There were condensed thoughts that often kept me puzzling over their meanings long after their words had died on the air. Mrs. Flaxman sat, a mostly silent listener, but in no wise showing weariness at the lateness of the hour, ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... soup for man," as Moliere says by the mouth of the judicious Gros-Rene. This comparison suggests a sort of culinary art in love. Then the virtuous wife would be a Homeric meal, flesh laid on hot cinders. The courtesan, on the contrary, is a dish by Careme, with its condiments, spices, and elegant arrangement. The Baroness could not—did not know how to serve up her fair bosom in a lordly ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... 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 case with most nations. It is a lucky thing that God made Man, and that Man has not to make God: we should fare badly, judging by the specimens already produced—Frankenstein ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... our grasp upon the comparative method of inquiry, the more brilliant is the light thrown upon that brief day of Athenian greatness, and the more wonderful and admirable does it all seem. To see this glorious community overthrown, shorn of half its virtue (to use the Homeric phrase), and thrust down into an inferior position in the world, is a mournful spectacle indeed. And the book which sets before us, so impartially yet so eloquently, the innumerable petty misunderstandings and contemptible jealousies which brought ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... prize-fight, given in detail, by rounds, is followed by an orgy of drunkenness rising to a scale almost Homeric. The man, crazy with alcohol, runs amuck, and things begin to happen. The village is turned upside down. Two powerful contrasts are dramatically introduced, one as an interlude between violent phases of the debauch, the other as a conclusion. The first is the contrast ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... of the ABSOLUTE and the INFINITE! If the cardinal truths of philosophy and religion hitherto received are doomed to be imperilled by such speculations, one feels strongly inclined to pray with the old Homeric hero,—'that if they must perish, it may be at least in daylight.' We earnestly counsel the youthful reader to defer the study of German philosophy, at least till he has matured and disciplined his mind, and familiarised himself ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... conception, sober directness and potency of expression, sustained dignity of thought and sentiment and style, the complete presentation of whatever is essential, the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative: indeed for every Homeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement. Here, for example, is something of that choice yet ample suggestiveness—the only true realism because the only perfect ideal of realisation—for which the similitudes of the 'Ionian father ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... at the northern end of the spacious bay of Navarino, lies the little town of Pylos, generally believed to have been the home of the Homeric Nestor. Since the conquest of Messenia by the Spartans, the town had remained in ruins, and the country for some distance round was a desert. The natural advantages of the adjacent coast had already caught the keen eye of Demosthenes, and he had formed the ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... to his usual modest reticence. He had explored in Brazil, seen service in the Boer War, hunted in India and Africa—matters of experience of which he never spoke. Upon this occasion, however, evidently taking Monty's recital word for word as literal truth, and excited by it into a Homeric mood, he might tell a story. The cowboys almost fell upon their knees in their importunity. There was a suppressed eagerness in their solicitations, a hint of something that meant more than desire, great as it ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... of Catullus, this unvarying versification, lacking imagination, lacking pity, padded with useless words and refuse, with pegs of identical and anticipated assonances, this ceaseless wretchedness of Homeric epithet which designates nothing whatever and permits nothing to be seen, all this impoverished vocabulary of muffled, lifeless tones ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Pococurante's remarks to Candide about the works of Homer. He ought not to have left in so many combats; they were as like one another and as tedious as those in the Iliad, besides being much noisier, at least we are not told that the Homeric heroes were accompanied by a muscular pianist, fully armed, and by the incessant stamping of clogged boots. Nevertheless the majority of the audience enjoyed the fights, for ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... and certain works of genuine fame can only cease to act for mankind, when men themselves cease to be men, or when the planet on which they exist, shall have altered its relations, or have ceased to be. Lord Bacon, in the language of the gods, if I may use an Homeric phrase, has ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Homer or Shelley that grasped Reality? This is not a question of literary excellence; it is a question of the sense of life. And—oddly enough—it is a question to which the intellect has no answer. The life in each of us takes hold of it and answers it empirically. The normal man is Homeric, though he is not aware of the fact. Especially is the American Homeric; naif, spontaneous, at home with fact, implicitly denying the Beyond. Is he right? This whole continent, the prairies, the mountains and the coast, the trams and trolleys, the sky-scrapers, the factories, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Homeric was that combat in the Harrow Road; to its starter and timekeeper a contest of giants, awful in force, in skill, in agility, in endurance. Dion boxed quite his best that day, helped by his gallery. He fought to win, but he didn't win. Nobody won, for there was no knock-out blow given ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... younger students take no interest in the manual work of the people upon whose thoughts the tone of their early intellectual life has exclusively depended. But I am not surprised that the interest, if awakened, should not at first take the form of admiration. The inconsistency between an Homeric description of a piece of furniture or armor, and the actual rudeness of any piece of art approximating, within even three or four centuries, to the Homeric period, is so great, that we at first cannot recognize ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Davis!" "Up!" called Raleigh, "Lift the chanty of Black Bill's Honey-moon, Jack! We'll keep the chorus going!" "Silence, all!" Ben Jonson echoed, rolling on his bench: "This gentle lawyer hath a longing, lads, To hear a right Homeric hymn. Now, Jack! But wet your whistle, first! A cup of sack For the first canto! Muscadel, the next! Canary for the last!" I brought the cup. John Davis emptied it at one mighty draught, Leapt on a table, stamped with either foot, And ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the product of a more cultivated age, these characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives unconsciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, on the contrary, has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious effort of the spirit, made for ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... Eastern Department, from Maine to Maryland, Rhode Island to Ohio. Also Canada—Halifax, Quebec, Montreal. Over at the other end of the room are the Southern cities, Atlanta, New Orleans, St. Augustine—with some of the old Spanish houses still standing. Do you know it strikes me there is something Homeric, something epic, about a map desk. You can turn to any building in any city on the continent, at a moment's notice. I can show you the Old South Church, or Fraunce's Tavern in New York where Washington ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... and German ideas had passed thus over our heads there ensued disgust and mournful silence, followed by a terrible convulsion. For to formulate general ideas is to change saltpetre into powder, and the Homeric brain of the great Goethe had sucked up, as an alembic, all the juice of the forbidden fruit. Those who did not read him, did not believe it, knew nothing of it. Poor creatures! The explosion carried them away like grains of dust into the abyss ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... History, like the Homeric Zeus, looks down with the same cheerful countenance upon the bloody works of war and upon the peaceful peoples that innocently nourish themselves upon the milk of their herds. However lawlessly the freedom of man may seem to operate upon the course of the world, she gazes calmly at the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... style. No one, however, has yet equalled old Chapman—certainly not Pope nor Cowper. The most successful translation into a modern language is unquestionably the German one by Voss. Mure and Grote have written the ablest dissertations in English upon the Homeric controversy, but they are not poets, and could not if they would ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... though it occupies more than 160 lines, is intensely rapid and vigorous; indeed it is the one genuinely exciting combat in Latin epic, and forms a refreshing contrast to the pseudo-Homeric or pseudo-Vergilian combats before the walls of Thebes. In no other portion of the Thebais does Statius attain to such success, with the exception of the passage already quoted descriptive of the death ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... accompanied by a recitation of the story of one of the two great Homeric poems, would not alone broaden the outlook of the young people who took part. Mr. Fenton had a shrewd idea that it would awaken among the older people in Westhaven a wider vision of beauty. Like ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... poor geographer. The crew burst out into loud Homeric laughter. Paganel ran about like a madman, seized his head with both hands and tore his hair. He neither knew what he was doing nor what he wanted to do. He rushed down the poop stairs mechanically and ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... researches were very unsatisfactory until the time of Hipparchus. The primitive knowledge was almost nothing. The Homeric poems regarded the earth as a circular plain bounded by the heaven, which was a solid vault or hemisphere, with its concavity turned downward. This absurdity was believed until the time of Herodotus, five centuries after; nor was it exploded fully in the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... spirit which held the issue of the conflict long in doubt. The beginning of the new century saw its force increase—a civil war carried on beyond the vision of the nations in the vast forests of the north. The story of this Homeric struggle, however, with its romantic episodes and opposing heroes—Cuthbert Grant, Colin Robertson, Duncan Cameron, and the rest—the battle of Greys against Blues, in which the chiefs of the north, issuing with their wild bois brules from the stronghold of Fort William,[43] ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... Of course this is not a bona fide quotation, but a whimsical adaptation of various Homeric verses; the last is a coinage of his own, and means, that he is to have no part, either in the flesh of the victim or in the ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... strike Mr. Elkins as the best practical joke he had ever heard of; and Cornish suggested that for a man to stop in Homeric laughter on Broadway might be pleasant for him, but was embarrassing to his companions. By this time Cornish himself was better-natured. Jim took charge of our movements, and commanded us to a dinner with him, in the nature of a celebration, with ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... with Homeric vigour and heroic inspiration. It is graphic, picturesque, and dramatically effective . . . shows us Mr. Henty at ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... swifter waters. Still others, lining up on either side of one of the great brown tree trunks, carried it bodily to its appointed place. From one end of the rear to the other, shouts, calls, warnings, and jokes flew back and forth. Once or twice a vast roar of Homeric laughter went up as some unfortunate slipped and soused into the water. When the current slacked, and the logs hesitated in their run, the entire crew hastened, bobbing from log to log, down river to see about it. Then they broke the jam, standing surely on ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... established fact that the first people who spoke an Aryan language were a tribe of barbarous nomads, who wandered in the highlands of central Asia. Those who have studied the earliest products of Aryan genius in the Vedas, the Zend-Avesta, and the Homeric songs, will be willing to admit that these wandering barbarians may have had minds capable of the highest efforts to which the human intellect is known to have attained. Yet if an irruption of Semitic or Turanian conquerors had swept that infant tribe ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... of "Father, Son and Holy Ghost" beside the Homeric trinity, "Father, Mother and Child," and prove that the Bible has elevated woman. The Homeric conception of woman towers like the Norway pine above the noxious growth of the Mosaic ideal. Compare the men and the women of the Bible with the stately figures ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Most of what they said makes dry reading to-day, but we shall occasionally find passages, like Patrick Henry's apotheosis of liberty, which speak to the ear of all time and which have in them something of a Homeric ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... has lost, and how much we have gained, is bound up with the question of the intrinsic value of knowledge and great ideas. Let us appraise knowledge as we would the Homeric poems, as some- ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... a Homeric narration of his hog-raising experience. In spite of herself the content of his talk interested her. And as for the effect upon her of his singular enthusiasm, it was deep and compelling. The little-boned Berkshire ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... the rivalry between bibliophiles of high rank and great wealth, whose Homeric contests have been worthily described by Dibdin in his history of the Bibliomania. A note in one of the Althorp Caxtons records a more amicable arrangement. The book belonged to Mr. George Mason, at ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... appreciated by all his hearers. And so it was that a smile began to go round, until at length it deepened and developed into laughter, and so went on deepening and broadening and intensifying, until at last the laughter grew, if not Homeric, at least loud enough and long enough for ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... elsewhere aroused the world. He labored, and other men, better trained than he, have entered into his labors. The material for study is constantly accumulating, and constant progress is being made in classifying and interpreting this material. A civilization antedating the Homeric poems stands now dimly revealed to us. Mycenae, the city "rich in gold," the residence of Agamemnon, whence he ruled over "many islands and all Argos," [Footnote: Iliad II, 108] is seen to have had no merely legendary ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... seems very serious which is only personal and, since all things which we apprehend must become in some sense personal, nothing is very important. The procession of human effort becomes a spectacle at sight of which Homeric laughter may sometimes be permissible, but tears never. If a man once gives way to weeping in Keewatin, he will weep always. Only by the exercise of a self-restraint which at first seems brutal can ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... describe school scenes rather different, I suspect, from school scenes in our day. One boy, on coming late, explained that the cause had been a regular pitched battle between his parents, with the details of which he amused his school-fellows; and he described the battle in vivid and Scottish Homeric terms: "And eh, as they faucht, and they faucht," adding, however, with much complacency, "but my minnie ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... came next. I had never declared myself, they said. Was I for Home Rule? I said we must first review Mr. GLADSTONE's numerous writings about HOMER, and then come to Home Rule. "HOMER stops the way!" Were Mr. GLADSTONES Homeric theories compatible with a rational frame of mind? Here I felt very strong, and animated with a keen desire to impart information. The deputation said all this was ancient history. As to Home Rule ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... the Pavilion de Flore, the windows of which looked on the corner of the Pont Royal and on the gate into the Tuileries gardens. From these windows the quaintest sights were to be seen, not the least entertaining of which were the Homeric struggles of the sentries of the National Guard, absolute slaves to their orders, to prevent dogs which were not led by a string from following their owners into the Tuileries gardens, in which struggles the bold city guard, in spite of prodigies of ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... concentric rings or with knobs and bosses, would put to shame the rank and file of cheap modern metal work. Nay, the very trumpets which sounded the onset often lie buried by the warrior's side, and the bells which adorned his horse's neck bring back to us vividly the Homeric pictures ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Villiers, while Ian Hamilton rallied the defenders and led them in repeated rushes against the enemy's line. Continually reinforced from below, the Boers fought with extraordinary resolution. Never will any one who witnessed that Homeric contest question the valour of our foes. It was a murderous business on both sides. Edwardes of the Light Horse was struck down. In a gun-emplacement a strange encounter took place at point-blank range between a group of Boers and of Britons. De Villiers ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... elaborately fortified defences, the proudest of Germany's supermen of war had been beaten at their own game by the civilian soldiers of "effete and luxury loving Britain," and the republican armies of "decadent France," and still the Homeric fight was raging. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the Hun was fighting to hold the line which should make good his insolent claim to the hegemony of the world. Step by step, yard by yard, that line was being torn from his bloody fingers. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... the Homeric kabab, and claimed that it had been handed down from the days of the old Grecian writer and philosopher; which, if true, proved that Homer knew a delicious thing ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... "Well, during the Homeric period the gods really went at it, using humanity as players in their battles, like a game of chess, actually. Come to think of it, chess did originate in the realm of the gods after the laws. Things were quite a mess back then, though, with a whole horde ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... earth, Farewell to honest fun and wholesome mirth! Adieu to genial DICKENS, gentle HOOD! Hail to the peddling pessimistic brood Whose "nimini-pimimi" mouths, too small by half To stretch themselves to a Homeric laugh, Mince, in a mirror, to the "Paphian Mimp!" MOMUS is dead, and e'en that tricksy imp Preposterous Puck hath too much native grit To take the taste of OSRICK turned a wit. Humour baccilophil, microbic merriment, Might suit him better. He will try the experiment. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, February 4, 1893 • Various
... side by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are telling on the world around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler thinking, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexities in which modern life ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... joys or the woes we sing we should be as worn out in three months as a pair of old boots," said the poet, smiling. "But stay, you shall not come from Havre to Paris to see Canalis without carrying something back with you. Warrior!" (Canalis had the form and action of an Homeric hero) "learn this from the poet: Every noble sentiment in man is a poem so exclusively individual that his nearest friend, his other self, cares nothing for it. It is a treasure which is his alone, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... particular legend, which I will not specify, had become the "chief horror of the war." There may be something to be said for this point of view, but it strikes me as interesting that the old myth-making faculty has survived into these days, a relic of noble, far-off Homeric battles. And after all, what do we know? It does not do to be too sure that this, that, or the other hasn't happened and couldn't ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... argument ready, and etiquette was waived. "Time!" she repeated, and then the two battering-rams, revolving their fists country-fashion, engaged. Half-forgotten Homeric phrases began to flit from a faraway schoolroom back into the little teacher's mind and she began to be consoled for the absence of gloves—those tough old ancients had used gauges of iron and steel. The two boys were evenly ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... production of The Playboy turned the play into a battle-cry, and the artists, headed by Mr. Yeats, used Synge to belabour the Philistinism of the mob. In the excitement of the fight they were soon talking about Synge as though Dublin had rejected a Shakespeare. Mr. Yeats even used the word "Homeric" about him—surely the most inappropriate word it would be possible to imagine. Before long Mr. Yeats's enthusiasm had spread to England, where people who ignored the real magic of Synge's work, as it is to be found ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... largely justified. For if matter is inert, brute, dead—it certainly seems preposterous to speak of its having within it the potency of life—using "life" as a synonym for living organisms, including man. The nature-mystic is overwhelmed with Homeric laughter. ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... certain, my brother, that such as these are beasts. They do not consider that those rules serve principally as a frame for the Homeric poetry, and for other similar to it; and they set up one as a great poet, high as Homer, and disallow those of other vein and art and enthusiasm, who in their various kinds are equal, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... recognized and began to sing. In ten minutes after that he was playing accompaniments for a full train chorus and the seared zebra and impala bolted to right and left, pursued by Tarara-boom-de-ay, Ting-a-ling-a-ling, and other non-Homeric dirges that in those days were ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... and the doom which it was currently supposed they had intended for the others, struck and stirred popular imagination. Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the "Twelve ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... devoted to Orpheus and Hesiod, and the ornaments are in the oldest Greek style; severely simple; archaic, but not rude; the figures of the friezes in outline, and without relief. The saloon of reception, on the contrary, is Homeric; and in its colouring, design, and decoration, as brilliant, as free, and as flowing as the genius of the great Maeonian. The chamber of the throne is entirely adorned with white bas-reliefs, raised on a ground of dead gold; the subjects Pindaric; not inferior in many instances to the Attic ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... to fill in a picture of which the central figure had passed from the real to the ideal, these things may have been suggestive. So also, perhaps, was the Talmud. The redaction of that chaos began in the second century. But the Vedas, the Homeric poems, the Tripitaka as well, existed in memory long before they were committed to writing. The same is true of the Talmud. Orally it existed prior to the Christ. Considered as literature, if it may be so considered, it is the reverse of endearing. But of the many ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... and manufactured of such materials as pearl-shell and tortoiseshell may throw light upon the Homeric quotation "caught fish with the horn of the ox." In those far-off days, bronze wire rope, similar in design to the steel rope which is of common use in the present time, was employed. Ancient Greeks, though they ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... as moral offences capable of being rationally judged or even excused as unintentional, but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the last limit of imaginable horror: all these things take us back to dark regions of pre-classical and even pre-homeric belief. We have no right to suppose that Sophocles thought of the involuntary parricide and metrogamy as the people in his play do. Indeed, considering the general tone of his contemporaries and friends, we may safely assume ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... but judges subtle and complex characters by an over-simplified standard of decorum and censures Lovelace as an intricate combination of Achilles and Ulysses! His unnecessary labors to show that Richardson is not really Homeric illustrate the sterile application of epic canons to the novel that vitiates much early criticism ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... sight, both horse and rider, as they rose together over the green swells of the prairie; a picture more like that of some Homeric hero than a savage of ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... with staring eyes; his terrible nose dilated visibly. Then suddenly his lantern jaws parted to emit an obstreperous, Homeric peal ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... warriors to the combat, fearless of death, or prove an ample reward, on their return from the dangers of the ghazon, or the fight. The excitement they produce exceeds that of the grape. He who would understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild nomads of the East." Elsewhere he adds, "Poetry and flowers are the wine and spirits of the Arab; a couplet is equal to a bottle, and ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... tenderly human and cruelly hard, as of a god to whom all sympathies and tolerances are known, but who is invulnerable somewhere, who sees from a point in space where the pressure of earth's fear and pain, and so its pity, is lifted. It is here that the Shakespearean and Homeric worlds impinge and merge, not to be separated by any academic classifications. They meet in this sensitivity equally involved and aloof, sympathetic and arrogant, suffering and joyous; and in this relation we see Aristophanes as the forerunner of Shakespeare, ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... supreme have been turned into farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada we may find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the Homeric figure that once dominated the plains. In what we say as to his trade, therefore, or his fashion in the practice of it, we speak in terms of thirty or forty years ago, when wire was unknown, when ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough |
