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“... and signed himself ‘Télémaque’. The names are not, as she supposes, in allusion to Homer’s Mentor and Telemachos but (as she could have learnt from my book if not as a result of naturally wondering why Beardsley adopted the French form of Telemachos’s name) to Mentor and Télémaque in Fénelon’s novel Les Aventures de Télémaque. Only ...”

“... praised for its moral content, and, in the absence of a sacred book, poetry, especially that of Homer, formed the staple fare of elementary education. Nor is he sufficiently aware that in Plato’s time poetry, like all the arts, made an incomparably more powerful impact than it came to have during the Hellenistic period – not to mention ages like our ...”

“... classical literature, they underwent the practical selectivity of hand-copying and changing taste. Homer, the great school classic, survived the Middle Ages intact; of the novels, most disappeared. The five that remained at the Renaissance found an enthusiastic audience. Heliodoros’ Ethiopian Story gave Cervantes the model for a last bestseller; Racine ...”

“... with the book.Before ever I began my heart felt for the editor. Pope had not gone far into his Homer before he hoped that somebody would hang him, and the same wish may well have filled Mr Raban’s bosom: the subject is so enormous and it has been considered time out of mind from so many points of view ...”

“... Plutarch writes, ‘that there is the Elysian plain and the dwelling place of the blessed, which Homer sang about.’ Exhausted by the constant combat of the Sullan civil wars, Sertorius endeavours to find these islands, but fails.In the Roman period the islands increasingly came to be associated with real locations. The Harmodius skolion is one of a number ...”

“... which won Cliff Robertson an Oscar for Best Actor in 1968, and an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer has a crayon removed from his brain, becoming as smart as his daughter, Lisa, and turning whistle-blower about the hazards of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Powers isn’t up to anything so funny (or anything funny at all). He shifts the field of ...”

“... wasn’t removed from political and institutional contexts. What Cicero (adapting a line from Homer) calls ‘works of the word’ were bound up with the work of state. But pinning down the ways in which the two were connected isn’t straightforward. As Paul Zanker pointed out in The Mask of Socrates (1996), neither the Greeks nor the Romans recognised ...”

“... girl down to a cold room below while her mother walks the world and damages every living thing. Homer tells it as a story of the crime against the mother. For a daughter’s crime is to accept Hades’ rules which she knows she can never explain and so breezing in she says to Demeter: ‘Surely mother here is the whole story. For slyly he placed in my hands ...”

“... of copper pipe and a chocolate biscuit and a porn magazine called Fiesta and a dead bee and a Homer Simpson pattern tie and a wooden spoon, but not my book.’ But the main thing Christopher’s father deals with is Christopher, and Christopher is the main thing his mother struggled to deal with. This is the parents’ story – it’s always the ...”

“... aristocratic privilege behind the appeal to citizen solidarity. This is the world dramatised by Homer and Hesiod, and a class analysis of the rise of the polis makes sense of some aspects of the poems. At Troy, Achilles withdraws from the fighting although he knows that the Achaean army will be destroyed without him, angry at Agamemnon’s theft of his ...”

“... may well have been the first Western author to address himself to posterity. His forerunners – Homer and Herodotus, principally – show no awareness of a readership extending beyond their own time. But Thucydides called his work ‘a possession for eternity’, and spoke of the chaos of civil war as something ‘that is and always will be, as long as ...”

“... the icewithout fuss.The others looked askance at him.He was ‘mighty of heart’like a hero in Homer.He worried them.Here’s another example.Early one day he was struck by a thoughtand stood from dawn in the same spot,pondering.He just couldn’t get it,continued to stand, continued to ponder.Noon came on.The others were noticing.‘Sokrates has stood in ...”

“... dislodge her mysterious impediment. ‘She is almost entirely uninterested in the literature of Homer, Plato and Herodotus, or the literature of the later period, written in demotic Greek, which her fellow students wish to read in the original.’ Her teacher, conversely, is very interested in philosophy and its cold comfort; he repeats a talismanic quote ...”

“... sort of mistake many poets have made, most famously Keats in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, where he gave Cortez, not Balboa, credit for discovering the Pacific. Nothing in Hecht’s poems reveals so well what, however artfully concealed, lay beneath the surface of his work: guilt, self-loathing, pettiness.Though Hecht’s poems often ...”

“... Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. It aims to look freshly at these artists and to ask again why their originality matters. Names like Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery are frequently dropped and sometimes deployed, as well as Jasper Johns, for his painting of the United States that is and is not ...”