United States or Afghanistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Also Herdegen had written out many verses of Homer's great song from a precious written book, and had learned to master them well from the teaching of the doctor of Feltre.
Seager on the little island of Mokhlos, off the coast of Crete, have paralleled the splendour of the Trojan treasure with work which is undoubtedly of the same early date as the Second City, so that Schliemann's accuracy has been confirmed in this instance. The citadel itself seemed far too small to fill the place which Troy occupies in Homer's description, even allowing for poetic exaggeration.
Bion was born at Smyrna, one of the towns which claimed the honour of being Homer's birthplace. On the evidence of a detached verse of the dirge by Moschus, some have thought that Theocritus survived Bion. In that case Theocritus must have been a preternaturally aged man.
In this brutal savage it is impossible to recognize Homer's chivalrous hero, who sacrificed the success of a ten years' war, fought originally for the recovery of one woman, to his grief at the loss of another, and has thus made it possible to describe the Iliad as the greatest love-poem ever written.
But Neptune was displeased at the conduct of the Phaeacians in thus rescuing Ulysses from his hands. In revenge, on the return of the vessel to port, he transformed it into a rock, right opposite the mouth of the harbor. Homer's description of the ships of the Phaeacians has been thought to look like an anticipation of the wonders of modern steam navigation. Alcinous says to Ulysses,
Homer's world, restricted to less than a drummer's circuit, was nevertheless immense, surrounded by a thin veneer of universe the Stream of Ocean. But how it has shrunk! To-day, precisely charted, weighed, and measured, a thousand times larger than the world of Homer, it is become a tiny speck, gyrating to immutable law through a universe the bounds of which have been pushed incalculably back.
This story was followed by a murmur of incredulity of course, the thing was possible, but Homer's faculty for exaggeration was so well known that any statement of his was viewed with suspicion. Homer seemed hurt at this lack of faith, and was disposed to argue the point, but the sonorous voice of Mr.
The third Iliad again I have never forgotten, nor the twenty-fourth; nor the picture of the two gods, like vulture birds, watching the battle from the dead tree. Nor, again, do I ever fail to recapture the beat of the heart with which I apprehended some of Homer's phrases: "Sandy Pylos," Argos "the pasture land of horses," or "clear-seen" Ithaca.
Indeed we are even told that "Many men must have served as authors and improvers." The mob of reciters improved the great epic of Homer! Scarcely less brilliant is the suggestion of another higher critic that, "Homer's Iliad was not composed by Homer, but by another man of the same name"!
Much as we may emulate Homer's wordy braggadocios in boasting ourselves far better than our fathers, still, great was the wisdom of our ancestors: and that time-tried wisdom has given us three things that make a man; he must build a house, have a child, write a book: and of this triad of needfuls, who perceives not the superior and innate majesty of the last requisite? "Build a house?"
Word Of The Day