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The Iliad
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  • The plot of The Iliad is not particularly divine or global.†   (source)
  • So if we would understand The Iliad (and it is worth understanding), we have to accept those values for those characters.†   (source)
  • Those names are drawn, of course, from The Iliad, although Walcott uses elements—parallels, persons, and situations—of both it and The Odyssey in his epic.†   (source)
  • In both The Iliad and The Odyssey Homer has characters say of other characters that they have "a heart of iron," iron being the newest and hardest metal known to men of the late Bronze Age.†   (source)
  • There are lots of useful lessons in The Iliad, but while it may at times read like an episode of The Jerry Springer Show, we'll miss most of them if we read it through the lens of our own popular culture.†   (source)
  • Consider some examples: Diomedes and Odysseus stealing the Thracian horses in The Iliad, the Lone Ranger waving from astride the rearing Silver, Richard III crying out for a horse, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda roaring down the road on their choppersin Easy Rider.†   (source)
  • The Iliad.†   (source)
  • After we'd finished with the Iliad, and with my new job in what he called "the scullery," he asked more questions about my parents.†   (source)
  • Achilles appears in the Iliad, by Homer.†   (source)
  • "You are laughing at me, and want to try me!" said d'Artagnan, whom anger began to take by the hair, as Minerva takes Achilles, in the ILIAD.†   (source)
  • He built up a constant exchange of books among his companions, borrowing and lending in an intricate web, from Max Isaacs, from "Nosey" Schmidt, the butcher's son, who had all the rich adventures of the Rover Boys; he ransacked Gant's shelves at home, reading translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey at the same time as Diamond Dick, Buffalo Bill, and the Algers, and for the same reason; then, as the first years waned and the erotic gropings became more intelligible, he turned passionately to all romantic legendry, looking for women in whom blood ran hotly, whose breath was honey, and whose soft touch a spurting train of fire.†   (source)
  • Then, overcome with wonder, his hair standing on end, Arjuna bowed his head to the Lord, joined his palms in salutation, and addressed Him: In Thy body, O Lord, I behold all the gods and all the diverse hosts of beings—the Lord Brahma, seated on the lotus, all the patriarchs * The principal text of modern Hindu devotional religiosity: an ethical dialogue of eighteen chapters, appearing in Book VI of the Mahabharata, which is the Indian counterpart of the Iliad.†   (source)
  • As for the book, it was Simon's copy of the Iliad, and I had been reading how the fair Briseis was dragged around from tent to tent and Achilles racked up his spear and hung away his mail.†   (source)
  • It was the Iliad that made Greece my paradise.†   (source)
  • From "Greek Heroes" to the Iliad was no day's journey, nor was it altogether pleasant.†   (source)
  • With Cosette's garter, Homer would construct the Iliad.†   (source)
  • The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the Iliad, the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias.†   (source)
  • No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket.†   (source)
  • "Alas!" said he, "here is a heap of bodies worthy of the fifth book of the Iliad!"†   (source)
  • I know my learned professors have found greater riches in the Iliad than I shall ever find; but I am not avaricious.†   (source)
  • The word-painting of Virgil is wonderful sometimes; but his gods and men move through the scenes of passion and strife and pity and love like the graceful figures in an Elizabethan mask, whereas in the Iliad they give three leaps and go on singing.†   (source)
  • I am content that others should be wiser than I. But with all their wide and comprehensive knowledge, they cannot measure their enjoyment of that splendid epic, nor can I. When I read the finest passages of the Iliad, I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life.†   (source)
  • Visvamitra, the greatest of the ascetic heroes of the Iliad of the East, had in him a perfect representative.†   (source)
  • The drilling-lessons were always protracted by episodes of warlike narrative, much more interesting to Tom than Philip's stories out of the Iliad; for there were no cannon in the Iliad, and besides, Tom had felt some disgust on learning that Hector and Achilles might possibly never have existed.†   (source)
  • In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.†   (source)
  • The Iliad does end early in the tale of Troy.†   (source)
  • 21 Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force, translated by Mary McCarthy (Iowa City, 1973).†   (source)
  • 20 See the excellent discussion in Redfxeld, Nature and Culture in the Iliad.†   (source)
  • But The Iliad traces the fall of the city rather to Paris.†   (source)
  • 26 The Iliad, translated with an introduction by Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1951).†   (source)
  • 15 See further in James Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago, 1978).†   (source)
  • The restrained pathos of the final book of The Iliad is characteristic of the poem as a whole.†   (source)
  • The Greeks themselves had already canonized The Iliad by the fifth century B.C. (when the title "Iliad" is first attested).†   (source)
  • 3 Whether the same poet composed both The Iliad and The Odyssey has been debated since antiquity, but need not concern us here.†   (source)
  • Like the Trojan expedition itself, The Iliad is a great marshaling of stories that Homer had to pick, combine, and shape.†   (source)
  • —Andrew Ford 23 Mark W. Edwards's Homer: Poet of the Iliad (Baltimore and London, 1987) has a valuable discussion of Homer's style.†   (source)
  • 13 For this reading, see Laura M. Slatkin, The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991).†   (source)
  • In this way, Homer magnifies the first all-out battle of The Iliad by echoing the original marshaling of the expedition.†   (source)
  • From this incident the rationale of the war will be increasingly called into question by Akhilleus, most strikingly in the ninth book of The Iliad.†   (source)
  • This is how Chapman translated The Iliad (first in 1598), though he turned in his Odyssey (1614) to rhymed decasyllabic couplets.†   (source)
  • 14 Cited on Book III by E. T. Owen, The Story of the Iliad, as Told in the Iliad (Toronto, 1946), an often-recommended basic guide to the poem.†   (source)
  • But The Iliad is several times longer than these, and sheer scale and size are clearly part of its ambition.†   (source)
  • Fitzgerald has succeeded in making The Iliad readable, an intelligible drama that moves forward steadily.†   (source)
  • To put The Iliad in its historical contexts also makes it at least as fascinating as when it is seen as the product of a single artistic genius.†   (source)
  • What is very clear is that The Iliad, even if it was as early as 750 B.C., came out of a very old tradition of heroic song.†   (source)
  • The tension is only implicit in The Iliad, but the question of who shall be "best of Akhaians" is always in the air.10 A candidate who emerges for this title is Diomedes, the son of Tydeus.†   (source)
  • We do not hear of this story in other accounts of the career of Zeus, and it seems likely that Homer has improvised it to give weight to a plea that will set the action of The Iliad in motion.†   (source)
  • 8 The most recent editor of the Greek text of The Iliad, Martin L. West, has translated this material for The Loeb Classical Library: Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer (Cambridge, Mass.†   (source)
  • When Greece fell under the sway of Rome in the third and second centuries, The Iliad began its metamorphosis from great national epic into the first poem of Europe.†   (source)
  • 1 The immense story of Homer's reception is very well told in Howard Clark, Homer's Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey (Newark, 1981).†   (source)
  • The scholarly six-volume The Iliad: A Commentary, edited by G. S. Kirk et al. (Cambridge, 1985-1993), contains excellent, readable essays on major topics of Homeric research.†   (source)
  • The first and more familiar is The Iliad as the "Song of Troy" (the meaning of "Iliad"), a classic, text that stands at the beginning of a Western epic tradition more than twenty-five centuries old.†   (source)
  • The Iliad is introduced as a very limited story from late in the war; but as it plays out it is as though everything were happening for the first time.†   (source)
  • 9 A sensitive explication of the rhetoric of Homer's heroes is Richard P. Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca, 1989).†   (source)
  • As daughters of Mnemosyne, "memory," the Muses personify oral tradition, and Greek song traditions about Troy constitute the third and most immediate context in which to locate The Iliad.†   (source)
  • Perhaps the most striking Eastern literary antecedent to The Iliad is the story of Gilgamesh, which derives from Sumerian legends that reach back to the third millennium.†   (source)
  • For a subtle reading of The Iliad in these terms, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore and London, 1979).†   (source)
  • Tracing literary traditions to individual inventors not only oversimplifies—The Iliad is far from being the oldest epic in the world—but obscures the amazingly rich and complex traditions that lie behind the work.†   (source)
  • In the high-classical culture of Athens, The Iliad, along with its sequel, The Odyssey, was memorized by schoolboys, performed to vast audiences in public arenas, and studied closely by scholars in lectures and monographs.†   (source)
  • 18 Ancient testimony claims that Book X was a later insertion into the poem, and even The Iliad's most fervent admirers will have trouble denying that removing it from the work would increase its dramatic tightness.†   (source)
  • THE ILIAD BOOK ONE Quarrel, Oath, and Promise Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous, that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss and crowded brave souls into the undergloom, leaving so many dead men—carrion for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.†   (source)
  • The Iliad and the Anger of Achilles The Iliad is both a landmark in the history of literature and a relic of its prehistory, so that to read it today is to encounter two masterpieces of ancient narrative at once.†   (source)
  • The nineteenth-century "analytical" tradition of carving The Iliad into originally separate "lays" that were awkwardly combined by "Homer" is now generally regarded as fruitless, but Book X is a reminder that ancient and modern standards of coherence are not always identical.†   (source)
  • The "Anger of Achilles" became The Iliad because it suggests, despite its focus on a single episode in Akhilleus' meteoric life, the utter devastation of the Trojan War and gives it meaning through the eyes of its hero.†   (source)
  • This makes him more conscious of the price of heroism, but the same choice faces any mortal hero.16 From this perspective, the opening quarrel of The Iliad has a larger resonance, for the dishonor of having lost a woman is what the Trojan War is about.†   (source)
  • By the time The Iliad was written down, Gilgamesh had been the most popular heroic saga throughout the Near East for a thousand years, being translated and transmitted on baked clay tablets through the lands of Asia Minor and all the way to the Mediterranean.†   (source)
  • The Opening of The Iliad: The Stakes The stories canvased above show that Homer had a choice of innumerable starting points for his song, but he decided to set off his story of immense suffering with a small, almost trivial incident.†   (source)
  • An obvious starting point for these traditions is the fall of Troy itself, for there was indeed a city of Troy, and it does seem to have suffered a series of disasters around the time that later Greek scholars set for the Trojan War, 1184 B.C. We know this because of the pioneering archaeological labors of Heinrich Schliemann, who, in a time when Homer was regarded as pure fantasy, followed up clues in The Iliad to the northwest coast of Turkey a mile or two from the entrance to the Dardanelles.†   (source)
  • In fact, the two perspectives are finally inseparable: serving as a repository of the past in an unlettered culture, the singer of epic aspired to be traditional, to retell the oldest stories without obvious novelty or idiosyncrasy; yet these same traditions were so profuse and so many-sided in their meanings that only the strongest poetic vision could have wrought from them the definitive shaping that is The Iliad.†   (source)
  • Epic song, the final and immortal form of glory, is a great thing; but at root its power comes from sheer naming, as Homer gives out again the name the warrior's mother once gave him.22 19 Extensive parallels in the structure of The Iliad are highlighted in Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.†   (source)
  • Such was his prestige that when Virgil aspired to compose the national Roman poem, he built his Aeneid squarely upon Homer: its first six books followed The Odyssey to tell how Aineias survived the fall of Troy and made his way to Italy, and the last six books closely refashioned The Iliad to recount the tragic war he fought there to found a new civilization.†   (source)
  • destiny: he will indeed excel his father, for no warrior at Troy was greater; but he will assuredly die, and not all his greatness and half-divine descent can fend off the destiny laid on him before his birth.13 A final tale, recounted in part by Hesiod but ignored by Homer, explains why the Greeks are at Troy, for no less a reader of The Iliad than Pope admitted that "the reader ...is apt to wonder at the Greeks for endeavouring to recover her at such an expense.†   (source)
  • Epics Before Homer On most estimates, The Iliad as we know it first came into shape sometime between 750 and 650 B.C. The traditional nature of the epic language makes it hard to date precisely, and some scholars are pushing it toward the sixth century.2 Because of its undeniable overall design, it is convenient to follow Greek tradition and call the person who gave it final form Homer, with the qualification that this name only crops up about a century later than the poem and is enshrouded from the first in folktale and fancy.†   (source)
  • 3 The standard book and line enumeration of the Greek texts may have been imposed by ancient scholars long after Homer; the implications of this question for reading The Iliad are richly discussed in Oliver Taplin, Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford, 1992).4 Major studies are: Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, Mass.†   (source)
  • Greek Epic in the Eighth Century B.C. We can glimpse the traditions behind The Iliad only indirectly, for it is the oldest Greek poem we have; linguists place it earlier than The Odyssey by about a generation (though our tools are not sharp enough to exclude the possibility that both poems were composed by a single, long-lived singer).†   (source)
  • Signs of renewed collective enterprise and an increased sense of national identity are the Olympic games, founded in 766 B.C., the establishment of an oracular center for all Greeks at Delphi, and a new wave of colonization and exploration that expanded the Greek horizons from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Black Sea beyond the Troad.7 It has been noted that a main concern of The Iliad is the difficulties of keeping together a massive but tenuously united coalition.†   (source)
  • Alongside these ancestral inheritances, The Iliad also clearly reflects the influence of Near Eastern civilizations, for the time in which the poem came into shape was also one of strong Eastern influence on Greek culture.4 The very fact that we have a text of The Iliad documents this influence, for the song could not have been written down without the alphabet that the Greeks adapted from a Western Semitic script sometime in the eighth century.†   (source)
  • Ever so far back, preluding thee, America,
    Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia,
    The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian,
    The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene,
    The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas,
    Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur,
    The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen,
    The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds,
    Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds,
    The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays, plays,
    Shakespeare, Schiller, Walte†   (source)
  • The hexameter of the Iliad is not the hexameter of the Aeneid.†   (source)
  • He spends the whole day in settling whether Homer expressed himself correctly or not in such and such a line of the Iliad, whether Martial was indecent or not in such and such an epigram, whether such and such lines of Virgil are to be understood in this way or in that; in short, all his talk is of the works of these poets, and those of Horace, Perseus, Juvenal, and Tibullus; for of the moderns in our own language he makes no great account; but with all his seeming indifference to Spanish poetry, just now his thoughts are absorbed in making a gloss on four lines that have been sent him from Salamanca, which I suspect are for some poetical tournament.†   (source)
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