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“... its well-remembered adventures and faster pace, the Odyssey has always been outsold – out of 590 Homer papyrus fragments recovered in Egypt at the last count, 454 preserve bits of the Iliad. The ready explanation – that ancient schoolmasters preferred the Iliad because the other Homer is just too much fun – is no doubt ...”

“... could be written in terms of the relative status, at given periods and in different societies, of Homer and Virgil. The actual Homeric texts come late into European Christendom. Dante knew of the ‘sovereign poet’ only by hearsay and via derivative epics. The Virgilian presence is continuous. Christological readings of the Fourth Eclogue bestow on Virgil ...”

“... If Homer had walked the English soil in 1597 he would have felt that he had lived in vain. At that date no English poet had a substantial knowledge of either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Although the statutes of grammar schools made proud boasts that Greek was studied in the higher forms, it’s likely that by the end of the 16th century only a handful of schoolchildren could read more than a few lines of Homer in the original ...”

“... At the time​ of his death in 1910, Winslow Homer was considered one of America’s greatest painters, yet he remains largely unknown in the UK. No work by Homer can be found in a British public collection, and the current retrospective at the National Gallery (until 8 January) is only the second exhibition of his work, though Homer painted a number of English scenes and stayed near Tynemouth in the 1880s ...”

“... its dissenting voice). This eloquent transition in F.A. Wolf’s Prolegomena to his edition of Homer (1795) might stand as the motto and the problem of Homeric studies ever since. Wolf, who was the first to examine seriously how the Iliad and Odyssey came down to us, thought that such long and complex works could not have been composed in an illiterate age ...”

“... catch the eye of your host; he is looking rather anxious. There must have been some argument over Homer’s fees. Reading Homer for the first time is like watching Athena crack out of Zeus’ skull fully armed or like opening the caves at Lascaux and discovering the Sistine Chapel ceiling inside. He arrives on the field of ...”

“... was an opportunity to experience the poem in its original medium, by the ear rather than the eye. Homer himself had probably chanted his verses plucking the strings of a lyre, like the bard Demodocus in the Odyssey and for many centuries after his death people did not read Homer: they listened to skilled rhapsodes, whose ...”

“... At sandy Pylos​ (as Homer calls it) on the western coast of Greece it’s still possible to see the bathtub of Nestor, who figures in the Iliad as an ancient, well-meaning but rather long-winded hero. Nestor’s bath is a substantial piece of decorated terracotta fixed into a weighty base. It has sat in its present position since the late Mycenaean period (1300-1200 bc), which is roughly when the historical figures behind Homer’s epics are thought to have strode the earth ...”

“... a narrative done more in the manner of a chronicle than of a story. But in pace, tone and setting, Homer and Langley is the opposite of the chilly, energetic earlier book, and a departure from the bulk of Doctorow’s earlier work (Lives of the Poets, a comparatively unachieved, fragmentary work from 1984, is its nearest precursor). It takes place almost ...”

“... their cows? Why did they prefer Euripides to Sophocles? Why did they throw away so many copies of Homer? The last question invites a reflective answer. The Greeks had their classic texts, which are still among our own ‘classics’: how they reacted to them over time says something particular about the uses of literacy. The classical canon began forming in ...”

“... into song. When read aloud, ‘the long lists of names become music.’ Ancient critics praised Homer for his enargeia, often now translated as ‘vividness’. George Puttenham in The Art of English Poesie said enargeia ‘geueth a glorious lustre and light’. In Memorial (2011), her anti-heroic, radically pared-back version of the Iliad, Alice Oswald ...”

“... by no means ends, with a minute enquiry into the expression in medias res. Horace observed that Homer, instead of starting his poem about the Trojan War from the beginning – ab ovo, Leda’s egg from which was hatched Helen of Troy – chose to rush his listeners ‘into the midst of things’, with a quarrel that occurred when the war had been going on ...”

“... sculptures depicting the first and second Trojan Wars, originally from the temple of Aphaia (Homer refers more than once to Heracles’ earlier sacking of Troy). But Naples has been generous with its frescoes. One shows Helen being helped onto Paris’s boat and another Thetis collecting her son’s armour from Hephaestus, her appraising gaze reflected ...”

“... and compiled by later editors; the unitarians clung to the notion that (as the joke goes) even if Homer didn’t compose the Iliad and the Odyssey, another poet of the same name did. The analysts outnumbered the unitarians, though that may have been in part because the analytical view provided more fertile ground for study.Parry didn’t answer the Homeric ...”

“... malfeasance requiring the intervention of the heroic, dissenting individual. If the mild-mannered Homer Loomis Pound, who worked nearly all his life in the same fairly humble job in the assayer’s department at the US Mint in Philadelphia, beginning on a salary of $5 a day that rose, in nearly thirty years’ service, to only $2500 a year, really did somehow ...”