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“... speech’. Since barbaros (an onomatopoeic term suggesting babble, which does not occur in Homer) meant ‘one who does not speak Greek’, Homer’s compound word – the only occurrence in the Iliad of any derivative of barbaros – is pleonastic, or perhaps overemphatic or fussy (according to G.S. Kirk’s ...”

“... powerful and haunting cohesion. The poem here raises especially acutely the question of Homer’s attitude to heroic violence, the elusive blend of admiration for the ferocity of warriors and of recoil from the more blood-curdling things: acts or threats of decapitation, dismemberment, even cannibalism. The exact proportions of the blending are open ...”

“... her haste, a goddess. The similes build a bridge between the epic world and our own experiences. Homer was famous for his vividness – enargeia – in antiquity too: readers have always perceived his poetry as transparent, an open window onto a distant, heroic world. Ancient audiences thought he could describe what had happened in the age of the heroes ...”

“... sort of poetry – will be a pervasive presence in the society he describes. Yes, he did banish Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes – the greatest names of Greek literature. But not because they were poets. He banished them because they produced the wrong sort of poetry. To rebut Plato’s critique of poetry, what is needed is not a ...”

“... Until now he has worked on Greek texts, and is particularly admired for his translations of Homer. This handsome volume is a fitting cap to a distinguished career. It is graced with an introduction by Fagles’s long-time collaborator and friend Bernard Knox, who also wrote the introductions for Fagles’s Iliad and Odyssey. At the close of his ...”

“... home from its daily pursuits: Bart and Lisa from school, on skateboard and bike respectively; Homer in his car from his job at the nuclear plant; Marge in her car with baby Maggie from the supermarket. They all arrive at precisely the same time, and make a dash for the living-room sofa, all five hitting it at precisely the same moment. It’s a little ...”

“... childish way, I was convulsed with amusement at the performance. But then he started to talk about Homer. The audience, mostly middle-class suburban women who had shown no particular maenad frenzy for blood but who quite visibly loathed Logue, were hushed: then moved. He was extremely good at telling us about ...”

“... a useful conspectus of the comparative material. Like Jasper Griffin in his brilliant book Homer on Life and Death (1980), Macleod has made use of all this work. He does not believe, as I do, that Homer used writing: but he tells us that he has learned something both from analytic and from formulaic ...”

“... on a tour of global culture high and low, mostly from the last hundred years, to demonstrate how Homer’s great poem continues to permeate our sensibility and imagination. She is an informative and enthusiastic guide, and the sheer wealth of her examples is impressive. But the tour rarely stops at any given poem, novel, film, play, painting, opera or ballet ...”

“... about literature, except in connection with Matthew Arnold’s controversy with F.W. Newman over Homer, and not much about aesthetics in general. But he remarks that, in the study of Greek sculpture, Victorian Classicists, down to the brothers Gardner, still active in the Thirties of this century, continued to defend the aesthetics of Reynolds. In the domain ...”

“... on account of inability’. He noted of a damning review by E.A. Freeman of his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age that it ‘ought to humble me’. But it didn’t. On the contrary, he went on and on, and then some. His early Church Principles Considered in Their Results, which he described as ‘a work of very sanguine Anglicanism’, was 528 pages ...”

“... 24 historical essays ranging from the question of who, if anyone, wrote the poems attributed to Homer to the imperialism and bellicosity of Great Britain before the First World War? I contemplated this problem gloomily for a long time and then stumbled on the answer. It was provided, as has so often happened in my life, by Hugh Trevor-Roper himself. For the ...”

“... common criticism of Bacchylides is that he is too mainstream, too Homeric. Yet his engagement with Homer can be creative and pointed. There is his treatment of Briseis, for example, the slave girl who causes the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon which sets the Iliad in motion. In Homer, she remains featureless until the ...”