“... translation or recasting which can range all the way from the Augustan stylisation in Pope’s Homer to the ‘variations on a source-theme’ which we find in Mallarmé’s Poe or Pound’s Propertius. With rare exceptions, it is around these two formal poles and in terms of this executive triad that treatises on the theory and business of translation are ...”

“... and Nausicaa back to share your Phaeacian sand, then it is wonderful to be able to stick the Loeb Homer (unreadable though it is) in your beach bag. Translations are peculiarly ephemeral. It is unnerving to think that a generation assumed that Jackson Knight’s Penguin ‘was’ the Aeneid. For Greek tragedy, Housman’s wildly funny ‘Fragment’ says it ...”

“... at all. Unlike literature, history must ignore both suitors and Odysseus, but this passage in Homer still counts as evidence because it brings back to whatever date is chosen for its composition the arrival in Greece of the most powerful personal weapon of antiquity, which could nevertheless plausibly be unknown to stay-at-home suitors because it was so ...”

“... and the most relevant to the novel, comes in the work of Pigres, a poet who claims to be ‘Homer born again’ and who rewrites the Iliad interjecting a line of his own after each of Homer’s. Here both art and history are threatened, but in a potentially creative way: Pigres’s interpolations into the received ...”

“... Crusius taught at Tübingen for nearly half a century until his death in 1607. His lectures on Homer were so popular that the university had to knock down a wall to accommodate more students.‘Everything Greek delighted’ him, Crusius wrote, ‘as toys delight children’. He boasted that he ‘loved and admired the Greek language and the Greek people ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... use dates, but since Greek historiography had by that time achieved a chronology into which to fit Homer’s tale of Troy, Naevius’ story implies that Romulus founded Rome some time around what we would call 1130 BC. Fabius, who as a historian had to provide dates, put the foundation in the first year of the eighth Olympiad, 747 BC, with Romulus the ...”

“... adult male population could read or write to some degree. The well-educated enjoyed poets such as Homer, and even attempted their own verses in imitation; highly-skilled craftsmen might not manage much more than their own names. For those able to read and write with confidence, documents were not only conveyers of information, they were also eloquent ...”

“... appropriate to EITHER masturbation OR the purchase of a used car. 38. Write a poem in the style of Homer, beginning ‘If I won the National Lottery ...’ 39. Make love. 40. Do not read Finnegans Wake. 41. Which of the following domestic items seems to you most useful for the practice of augury? tealeaves; crazy paving; used nappies. 42. If you were given ...”

“... and Hurrian from Hattusas, the Hittite capital in northern Anatolia. One of the ancient Lives of Homer credits the poet with an epitaph composed for the grave of King Midas of Phrygia, whom we know from cuneiform sources to have been a vassal of Sargon II (722-05 BC); whether or not there is any truth in this tradition, it indicates that the poet was ...”

“... to require this. So here goes – with a justly famous poem, ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’: Much have 1 travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western Islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d ...”

“... suggests they had no real knowledge of what happened, any more than they did in the matter of Homer. But both Aeschylus and Euripides suggest that an earlier shrine in Delphi belonged, appropriately enough, to Gaia (Earth), and it’s confirmed by the archaeological record, which Scott, again rightly, says is what we should rely on, though he perhaps ...”

“... the sound of which cured him of his ennui.A more tragic story is that of the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, who lived in a brownstone in New York in the 1940s. The ‘hermits of Harlem’ were known in the neighbourhood as obsessive and indiscriminate collectors of junk, and their house was a local landmark for the clutter that surrounded it. In ...”

“... Jervas painted it, probably in 1717, when Pope – aged 29 – was deep in his translation of Homer, a lengthy task that not only sealed his fame as the country’s leading poet (he was admired by good judges when still under twenty) but secured him the fortune which made him free of patrons for the rest of his life: the first poet, he liked to think, who ...”

“... party, Tony Ray-Jones’s group on deckchairs making the best of a cold day on Brighton Beach, Homer Sykes’s naked girls in a fairground peepshow. They all say ‘this is how we are,’ in black and white: something in colour – less wry but also less affectionate, a later picture by Martin Parr, say – would destroy the mood as surely as turning up ...”