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“... are very fine in themselves, since Longley is one of few contemporary poets who can capture Homer’s spare and unrelenting humanity, but their impact often depends on their positioning alongside other poems. The Stairwell (2014) – one of the loveliest collections of verse in the past decade, and probably the place to start if you’re unfamiliar with ...”

“... the great and mostly snowy mountain in the far north of Greece that was identified as Olympus by Homer and Hesiod.* To get close to Apollo you might go to Delos, the place of his birth, or to Delphi, where you could actually ask him a question and receive an answer of some kind. To establish a relationship with Demeter, and to enjoy all the benefits she ...”

“... Sausages and sneezes​ both have small but significant parts to play in Homer’s Odyssey. Sausages (or blood-puddings, or ‘paunches full of blood and fat’ as more literal translators call them) figure occasionally as food. But they also pop and fizzle their way into a simile that describes Odysseus’ behaviour the night before he slaughters his wife Penelope’s suitors, which Peter Green translates like this: As a man cooking a paunch chockful of fat and blood on a fierce blazing fire will turn it to and fro, determined to get it cooked through as fast as he can, so Odysseus tossed this way and that, trying to work out how he was going to lay hands on the shameless suitors, one man against so many ...”

“... aware that many names have somehow gone wrong. He is especially excited by those places where Homer (already ‘ancient’ in Plato’s time) amazingly gives the gods’ word for something, alongside the human word: Hypnos (Sleep) hides in the branches of a pine, looking like the bird which the gods call chalkis and men call kymindis (Iliad, 14, 291). The ...”

“... why they fought each other, and set himself the task of finding out, in a work twice as long as Homer’s Iliad. Most of the reasons I liked Herodotus were, I soon found out, precisely those which generated virulent contempt for him in the minds of (mostly senior) ancient historians, for whom he was a superstitious, simple-minded anecdotalist, with a ...”

“... modern and futuristic technologies. The details of death in hand-to-hand combat as imagined by Homer before the walls of Troy – a skull cloven in just this way, a limb severed exactly so – have recurred in all wars fought between then and now. Bodies can now be vaporised and made to disappear completely, but there is at the same time a never-ending ...”

“... and the real element of unease they leave behind. Hermione de Almeida’s Byron and Joyce through Homer gives an enthusiastic account of Don Juan and of Joyce’s Ulysses in their relations with the Odyssey. Though nominally a study of three books, narrowness is not its vice, for there are well over a thousand proper names in the index, and the real subject ...”

“... became linked to Homeric epic. By 1735 the Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed ...”

“... historical science, therefore, Lilla plays down his evident interest in Greek mythology, and in Homer in particular. The significance of the Greek myths was that they enabled Vico to correct the manifest anachronisms in Livy’s account of early Rome. Rewriting Livy, he traced the course (corso) of Roman history from its beginning in the three ...”

“... unathletic, and couldn’t see the point of his schoolmates’ childish games. ‘Tom will play at Homer,’ his sister Margaret remembered one of them complaining; and ‘I can’t play at Homer.’ Zachary was a hard taskmaster, burdening his precocious eldest son with huge expectations – he hoped that, with proper ...”

“... friend, the neo-Platonist philosopher Pico della Mirandola, sent the first-ever printed edition of Homer to Aldus that year. But it’s one thing to enjoy the technical accomplishment of a printed Homer, and quite another to decide you’d like to have a go at printing one yourself. In the early 1490s, Aldus set up a ...”

“... academic subject, improves the way you think. Besides which, it enables you to read, for example, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Sappho, Sophocles, Euclid, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Lucretius, Seneca, Livy, Tacitus, Virgil, Ovid, not to mention Descartes: for all sorts of reasons, I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which no one understood them. And ...”

“... an act by focusing on the ‘foundational language-acts in our civilisation: the Hebrew Bible, Homer and Shakespeare’. This concern with reading returns to the theme of the ineradicable presence of the work of art in its encounter with the reader, which Steiner, in a challenge to Modernist and post-structuralist notions of authorship, stubbornly defended ...”

“... when I confessed that I wasn’t, asked what I would do all day in retirement if I couldn’t read Homer. But he liked the tragedians even more than Homer, and Euripides above the others. One can see why The Bacchae appealed to him; he was obviously fascinated by ecstasies, whether in the individual or in the mass, and the ...”

“... long ago – astonishingly, there is only one mention of anyone reading or writing anything in Homer – they offer themselves to us as rich objects for reverie and conjecture, becoming the ‘shore of dreaming’ (‘l’orée du songe’), as Roger Caillois called his own collection of stones. Like dream stones, the myths are puzzles, and they keep ...”