Blind People

"Νῦν μὲν δὴ μάλα πάγχυ κακὸς κακὸν ἡγηλάζει, ὡς αἰεὶ τὸν ὁμοῖον ἄγει θεὸς ὡς τὸν ὁμοῖον."

"Αὐτὰρ μῆλα κακοὶ φθείρουσι νομῆες."

"Δμῶες δ', εὖτ' ἂν μηκέτ' ἐπικρατέωσιν ἄνακτες, οὐκέτ' ἔπειτ' ἐθέλουσιν ἐναίσιμα ἐργάζεσθαι· ἥμισυ γάρ τ' ἀρετῆς ἀποαίνυται εὐρύοπα Ζεὺς ἀνέρος, εὖτ' ἄν μιν κατὰ δούλιον ἦμαρ ἕλῃσιν."

"Αἰδὼς δ' οὐκ ἀγαθὴ κεχρημένῳ ἀνδρὶ παρεῖναι."

"Ἐπεὶ οὔ τις ἐπίσχεσις οὐδ' ἐλεητὺς ἀλλοτρίων χαρίσασθαι."

"Εἰ δή πού τις ἐπουράνιος θεός ἐστι."

"Καί τε θεοὶ ξείνοισιν ἐοικότες ἀλλοδαποῖσι, παντοῖοι τελέθοντες, ἐπιστρωφῶσι πόληας, ἀνθρώπων ὕβριν τε καὶ εὐνομίην ἐφορῶντες."

"Οὐδὲν ἀκιδνότερον γαῖα τρέφει ἀνθρώποιο πάντων, ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει."

"Ἀλλ' ὅ γε σιγῇ δῶρα θεῶν ἔχοι, ὅττι διδοῖεν."

"Αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα σίδηρος."

"Αἶψα γὰρ ἐν κακότητι βροτοὶ καταγηράσκουσιν."

"Δοιαὶ γάρ τε πύλαι ἀμενηνῶν εἰσὶν ὀνείρων· αἱ μὲν γὰρ κεράεσσι τετεύχαται, αἱ δ' ἐλέφαντι. τῶν οἳ μέν κ' ἔλθωσι διὰ πριστοῦ ἐλέφαντος, οἵ ῥ' ἐλεφαίρονται, ἔπε' ἀκράαντα φέροντες· οἳ δὲ διὰ ξεστῶν κεράων ἔλθωσι θύραζε, οἵ ῥ' ἔτυμα κραίνουσι, βροτῶν ὅτε κέν τις ἴδηται."

"Ἀλλ' οὐ γάρ πως ἔστιν ἀΰπνους ἔμμεναι αἰὲν ἀνθρώπους· ἐπὶ γάρ τοι ἑκάστῳ μοῖραν ἔθηκαν ἀθάνατοι θνητοῖσιν ἐπὶ ζείδωρον ἄρουραν."

"Τέτλαθι δή, κραδίη· καὶ κύντερον ἄλλο ποτ' ἔτλης."

"Νύκτας δ' ὕπνος ἔχῃσιν, – ὁ γάρ τ' ἐπέλησεν ἁπάντων, ἐσθλῶν ἠδὲ κακῶν, ἐπεὶ ἂρ βλέφαρ' ἀμφικαλύψῃ."

"Μείδησε δὲ θυμῷ σαρδάνιον μάλα τοῖον."

"Ὡς ὅτ' ἀνὴρ φόρμιγγος ἐπιστάμενος καὶ ἀοιδῆς ῥηϊδίως ἐτάνυσσε νέῳ περὶ κόλλοπι χορδήν."

"Ὡς κακοεργίης εὐεργεσίη μέγ' ἀμείνων."

"Ἔστι γὰρ ἥμιν σήμαθ', ἃ δὴ καὶ νῶϊ κεκρυμμένα ἴδμεν ἀπ' ἄλλων."

"Ὅτε οἱ γλυκὺς ὕπνος λυσιμελὴς ἐπόρουσε, λύων μελεδήματα θυμοῦ."

"Τοὶ δ' ἀλλήλους φιλεόντων ὡς τὸ πάρος, πλοῦτος δὲ καὶ εἰρήνη ἅλις ἔστω."

"Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing, sooner than of war."

"A blind man; he dwells on the rocky Chios; and his songs are the first among men."

"O fortunate adolescens, qui tuae virtutis Homerum praeconem inveneris!"

"Omero poeta sovrano"

"Ὥσπερ δὲ καὶ τὰ σπουδαῖα μάλιστα ποιητὴς Ὅμηρος ἦν (μόνος γὰρ οὐχ ὅτι εὖ ἀλλὰ καὶ μιμήσεις δραματικὰς ἐποίησεν), οὕτως καὶ τὸ τῆς κωμῳδίας σχῆμα πρῶτος ὑπέδειξεν, οὐ ψόγον ἀλλὰ τὸ γελοῖον δραματοποιήσας· ὁ γὰρ Μαργίτης ἀνάλογον ἔχει, ὥσπερ Ἰλιὰς καὶ ἡ Ὀδύσσεια πρὸς τὰς τραγῳδίας."

"Δεδίδαχεν δὲ μάλιστα Ὅμηρος καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους ψευδῆ λέγειν ὡς δεῖ."

"The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author:—that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble."

"Homer, for his astonishing variety, animation, and sublimity, has not a warmer admirer than myself; he has been for three thousand years, like a reigning sovereign, applauded as a matter of course, whether from love or fear; for no man with safety to his own character can refuse to join the chorus of his praise. I never can express (and his other admirers have not done it for me) the pleasure I receive from his poems; but in a view of philanthropy, I consider his existence as having been a serious misfortune to the human race. He has given to military life a charm which few men can resist, a splendor which envelopes the scenes of carnage in a cloud of glory, which dazzles the eyes of every beholder, steals from us our natural sensibilities in exchange for the artificial, debases men to brutes under the pretext of exalting them to gods, and obliterates with the same irresistible stroke the moral duties of life and the true policy of nations. Alexander is not the only human monster that has been formed after the model of Achilles; nor Persia and Egypt the only countries depopulated for no other reason than the desire of rivalling predecessors in military fame."

"One of the earliest- and perhaps the first-rivals of the hymnology of war, hatred, and revenge made immortal by Homer was the poetry of an Aeolian woman called Sappha by her people but uniformly known to later times as Sappho... Much of Sappho's poetry was of a plaintive tenderness but she had a fervid feeling for love as a saving grace. Several of her feminine disciples also sang of the beauty and healing force of love. Solon the law-giver and Plato the philosopher were deeply affected by her hymns to the great idea of a social power unrecognized by "the Bible of the Greeks": Homer."

"Homer is the most simple in his style of all the great poets, and resembles most the style of the poetical parts of the Old Testament. They can have no conception of his manner, who are acquainted with him in Mr. Pope's translation only. An excellent poetical performance that translation is, and faithful in the main to the original. In some places, it may be thought to have even improved Homer. It has certainly softened some of his rudenesses, and added delicacy and grace to some of his sentiments. But withal, it is no other than Homer modernised. In the midst of the elegance and luxuriancy of Mr. Pope's language, we lose sight of the old bard's simplicity. I know indeed no author, to whom it is more difficult to do justice in a translation, than Homer."

"They say no woman could possibly have written the Odyssey. To me, on the other hand, it seems even less possible that a man could have done so. As for its being by a practised and elderly writer, nothing but youth and inexperience could produce anything so naïve and so lovely."

"Homer's poems were writ from a free fury, an absolute and full soul; Virgil's out of a courtly, laborious, and altogether imitatory spirit: not a simile he hath but is Homer's; not an invention, person, or disposition but is wholly or originally built upon Homerical foundations, and in many places hath the very words Homer useth; ... all Homer's books are such as have been precedents ever since of all sorts of poems; imitating none, nor ever worthily imitated of any."

"Of all books extant in all kinds, Homer is the first and best."

"Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as a blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact."

"Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right."

"Homer is a world; Virgil, a style."

"I have found by trial Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil... For the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet. [...] Virgil was of a quiet, sedate temper; Homer was violent, impetuous, and full of fire. The chief talent of Virgil was propriety of thoughts, and ornament of words; Homer was rapid in his thoughts, and took all the liberties, both of numbers and of expressions, which his language and the age in which he lived allowed him."

"It is hardly possible to overestimate the importance for Western Literature of the Iliads demonstration that the fall of an enemy, no less than of a friend or leader, is tragic and not comic. With the Iliad, once for all, an objective and disinterested element enters into the poet's vision of human life. Without this element, poetry is merely instrumental to various social aims, to propaganda, to amusement, to devotion, to instruction: with it, it acquires the authority that since the Iliad it has never lost, an authority based, like the authority of science, on the vision of nature as an impersonal order."

"The Homeric epics are the oldest poems in Greek that survive, but certainly not the oldest there were. It is not merely that their structure is too complicated and that we can point to contradictions in their contents; the legend of Homer himself contains many features incompatible with the portrait of the poet which we should construct from the sophisticated, sceptical and even frivolous spirit of the poems. The traditional picture of the blind old singer of Chios is largely made up of memories that go back to the time when a poet was a vates— a priestly and God-inspired seer. His blindness is merely the outward sign of the inward light that fills his being and enables him to see things others cannot see. This bodily infirmity expresses— as does the lameness of the divine smith Hephaestus—a second idea that was current in primitive times, that a maker of poems, ornaments and other products of handicraft can only come from the ranks of those who are unfit for war and foray. But apart from this feature, the legendary ‘Homer’ is an almost perfect example of the mythical poet who was still half-divine, a wonder-worker and a prophet. We find the clearest embodiment of this idea in Orpheus, the primeval singer who had his harp from Apollo and instruction in the art of song from the Muse herself; with his music he could move not merely men and beasts but even rocks and could reclaim Eurydice from the bonds of death. ‘Homer’ no longer boasts such magical power, but still retains the features of an inspired seer and remains conscious of a mysterious and sacred intimacy with the Muse whom he so confidently invokes."

"Seven cities warred for Homer, being dead, Who, living, had no roof to shroud his head."

"The poems of Homer purported to describe events of the early heroic golden age of , but many of the economic customs Homer described were more characteristic of the late barbaric period, just before 800 B.C.(?), when the epics were supposed to have been written. The forms of government and the economy they describe were feudal, and in some respects resembled Europe's Dark Ages. ..."Gifts" often took the place of royal revenues, taxes, and payments. ...Even craftsmen were often paid for their services in "gifts". Royal revenues also were derived from the king's personal estate, the duty of personal service, tribute, the spoils of war, piracy, and cattle raids. Armies lived off plunder; conquerors were free from taxation."

"Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus."

"The Homeric poems were to the Greeks more than national poems have ever been to any people."

"The Iliad and the Odyssey belong to the end, not to the beginning, of a poetical epoch. They mark the highest point reached by a school of poetry in Ionia, which began by shaping the rude war-songs of Aeolic bards into short lays, and gradually developed a style suited to heroic narrative."

"In the comparison of Homer and Virgil, the discriminative excellence of Homer is elevation and comprehension of thought, and that of Virgil is grace and splendor of diction. The beauties of Homer are therefore difficult to be lost, and those of Virgil difficult to be retained."

"Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet never did I breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken."

"Once the diction has been established it works of itself. Almost anything the poet wants to say, has only to be turned into this orthodox and ready-made diction and it becomes poetry. 'Whatever Miss T. eats turns into Miss T.'"

"In the Odyssey one may liken Homer to the setting sun, of which the grandeur remains without the intensity."

"I finished the Iliad to-day... I never admired the old fellow so much, or was so strongly moved by him. What a privilege genius like his enjoys! I could not tear myself away. I read the last five books at a stretch during my walk to-day, and was at last forced to turn into a by-path, lest the parties of walkers should see me blubbering for imaginary beings, the creations of a ballad-maker who has been dead two thousand seven hundred years. What is the power and glory of Caesar and Alexander to that?"