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“... West. It is easy to overlook the idea that is common to both sides in this debate: that reading Homer, Pindar, the tragic poets, the historians, Plato and Aristotle is an essential part of all Greek education. The debate presupposes that this literature, which few Greeks can now read in the original and many are unwilling to read even in translation, is ...”

“... War and sport were once much the same thing: Homer understood the strategies of morale as well as any modern team manager. Polybius tells an anecdote about Hannibal and his staff just before the Battle of Cannae. When an officer called Gisgo commented on the large number of Romans opposite, Hannibal remarked that at least there was no one over there whose name was Gisgo ...”

“... One wag​ subtitled it ‘Homer in a Nutshell’. The Batrachomyomachia, or The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice, was thought by the Romans and its early English translators to be a minor work of Homer’s from the eighth or ninth century BC, though its linguistic anachronisms and allusion to Callimachus place it as a likely Hellenistic epyllion ...”

“... Mediterranean for more than a hundred years, Scipio begins to weep, and then quotes the lines of Homer in which first Agamemnon and then Hector predict the fall of Troy, the mother-city of the Roman people. At Polybius’ prompting, Scipio confides that he is indeed thinking of the fate of Rome. Overachievement and overtoppling were inextricably built into ...”

“... that it’s sweeter to be alive – in any shape or form – than lord of all these shadows?’ In Homer he’s less terse: ‘Put me on earth again, and I would rather be a serf in the house of some landless man, with little enough for himself to live on, than king of all these dead men that have done with life.’ This is sometimes taken to mean that he ...”

“... leaves and birds massing before migration. Both similes evoke the analogy, at least as old as Homer, between the human lifespan and the annual cycle of the seasons, but strip it of the attendant idea of new generations budding in the spring. The emphasis on the youth of so many of the dead – beyond the pointedly nondescript ‘mothers, men’ – is a ...”

“... in it. A former classical scholar, he wanted to see how much he could remember of a passage from ...”

“... main entrance, was a semicircle of 11 seated statues of Greek poets and philosophers, including Homer, Pindar and Pythagoras. The Greek-style temple and statuary surely struck native worshippers as foreign impositions, both functionally and aesthetically (Thompson elsewhere remarks on the lack of cross-influence between locally-produced Greek and Egyptian ...”

“... has its canonical witches. There is Medea, barbarian and jilted lover, with her flaming poisons. Homer’s Circe, often allegorised as a figure of lust, who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs and takes him to bed for a year. In the Alexandrian poet, Theocritus, the deserted Simaetha, a petit-bourgeois woman, is desperate to enchant her lover back to her ...”

“... song has been thought of as a mourner’s lament. According to mythology more ancient than Homer, Zeus turned Aedon into a nightingale after she mistakenly killed her own son. In the Odyssey, Penelope lies awake at night longing for Odysseus and thinks of Aedon, who wails for the child she has slain. For Ovid, the nightingale’s song was that of a ...”

“... Cannibalism haunts our fictions from Homer to Ovid, from Euripides to Shakespeare, from Defoe to Sade, Flaubert, Melville, Conrad and Genet. It has been a theme in the vocabulary of political and racial imputation, long before and long after Montaigne’s classic essay, and in this sense among others has been a staple of satire in Juvenal, Swift and elsewhere ...”

“... or Isocrates?’ Truth and moral guidance were to be found in classical literature, especially in Homer and the philosophy of Plato and Socrates. There was no need to turn to ‘that new-fangled Galilean god’; no need to read the Evangelists, whose stunted prose and uncertain grasp of grammar would shame a schoolboy. ‘From studying your texts no one could ...”

“... impulse to write history has nourished much effective narrative, and narrative – above all in Homer – was one of the sources of history as a genre. It would be a strange paradox if narrative and history turned out to be incompatible. But the example of Homer may teach us not to take the paradox too tragically. The ...”

“... pointed out that the world’s first author was a woman.She lived fifteen hundred years before Homer, and she was a real person, not a composite of probably illiterate bards. We know this because the Woolley expedition also found the tomb of her hair stylist, at a site named PG 503. (PG is short for ‘personal grave’.) Inside were the tools of the ...”

“... would have found themselves in a polyglot place, among critics tracing variants in passages from Homer or tracking down copies of Persian poems to translate into Greek, doctors in search of written testimonials to support their cures, librarians busily copying out texts, or tagging and shelving scrolls. In the first centuries AD, the city was the scene of ...”