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“... literature, that drives so much of Werther’s self-image. He loves poetry, especially Homer and Ossian but also Lessing and Klopstock. His story raises the question of whether too much reading, or a certain kind of reading, is healthy or dangerous for the unformed personality. Rousseau had asked the same thing in his preface to Julie, or the New ...”

“... Zeus delivers​ the first speech in Homer’s Odyssey, and it soon transpires that he is in a petulant mood. ‘This is horrible!’ he thunders. ‘See how mortals blame us, the gods! They say that all bad things come from us, but it is through their own foolishness that people suffer beyond their portion.’ It isn’t immediately clear why Zeus sounds so frustrated, even impotent, despite being ruler of the universe, but on closer inspection it becomes apparent that he suffers from a common complaint ...”

“... For Tolstoy and Hemingway, as for Homer, writing about war was the natural thing. They did not exactly worship the demands of ‘hateful Ares’, as Homer calls him; but they knew that war as hell was the proper field of the heroic, and thus of narrative itself. The story of what happens in a football match today is our equivalent of yesterday’s battle; and it can be established later, as game, in the same heroic sequence ...”

“... unacceptable not merely for its scabrous material and linguistic saturnalia, but because it mimes Homer in far too mechanical a way. The authentic, developmental continuities are those between, say, Tolstoy and Homer or Mann and Goethe. It is against this implicit model that Franco Moretti sets out his merry bricolage (a ...”

“... to buy himself a poet who could rival John Dryden in merit and popularity) for a translation of Homer. This was probably the best deal ever struck by an English poet. The fee for the copyright combined with income from the sale of subscription copies of the Iliad made Pope around £5000. That was an eye-watering sum. The contract for Milton’s Paradise ...”

“... passion. In Greek literature there is something similar. The Olympian gods whom we meet in Homer are, despite their immortality, irredeemably human: they act as humans act and they are moved by human motives. It is not merely that their morals are mortal – that the King of the Gods is more renowned for the ingenuity of his philandering than for the ...”

“... he never went to prison, although some of his work was banned. The ‘H’ in The File on H is for Homer. It is a thriller about two classical scholars who travel to a small town in northern Albania in order to investigate the origins of the Homeric epic. They come from a university in the States, but they are Irishmen, not Americans. This is so often repeated ...”

“... for first-year university students. At their best they can be imaginative tours d’ horizon from Homer to Nietzsche, by way of Dante and Tolstoy, a critical genealogy of the ideas and assumptions which construct the Present. More usually, they represent a brisk exercise in joining up the geniuses. The reason these courses have not hitherto gained much ground ...”

“... History is a formidable tome: nine hundred learned pages by 19 learned scholars. It begins with Homer and proceeds at a steady pace to the third century AD. Most significant figures receive thorough discussion; in addition, the editors have justly defended the rights of minor characters, and they have called particular attention to the most recent ...”

“... and Constructivists dreamed of a brave new technological world as heroic as anything out of Homer. The scientific spirit was now at one with youth, dissent and political innovation. Precocious Russian Formalists cocked a snook at the cultural establishment by defining the literary work as an assemblage of devices. Meanwhile, most other modernist ...”

“... 700 years before the next passage was set beside it to form a consistent plot. Who remembers that Homer mentions only in passing the Judgment of Paris, when Paris’ choice of Aphrodite over Hera and Athena sparked the war in heaven that set in train the Trojan War? Or that the famous episode when the Trojan Horse is smuggled into Troy does not take place in ...”

“... the Greeks before Plato and before the beginning of systematic philosophy. His main sources are Homer and the tragedians, especially Sophocles. No one doubts that these authors can inform us about the ethical ideas of their contemporaries; but since, at least for the fifth century, there are other sources as well, notably historians and orators, the ...”

“... him only 13 hours a day to read, the man who spent 30 years on one volume, the man who wrote on Homer in 1806 and who still wrote on Homer in 1870, the man who discovered the 358 passages in which Dictys had imitated Sallust’. The ‘familiar type of German scholar’ had another side too, although not the one to which ...”

“... children inside. It is a very ancient tale, already much talked about when Odysseus met Circe in Homer, and has provided the material for numerous treatments in paint, poetry, opera and film. The ancients loved the gory details – a spit-logged Jason spewed from a dragon’s maw, men standing ridiculously in cauldrons wondering whether they would emerge as ...”

“... nature, always ‘a spectator of his own emotion’. Schiller’s examples of simple poets are Homer and Shakespeare; of sentimental poets, Milton and Kleist. Goethe is judged, ambivalenly, to be something of a miraculous bridge between the two attitudes. Schiller is too wise to fall into a general elegy for lost simplicity, since that is the modern ...”