Homer

And Homer too speaks somewhat thus:

Let us speak, then, of the king as Homer and the truth conceive him;

for, as the poet says, the god did not grant even this to the sons of Asclepius.

Homer too calls a craftsman "wise," and concerning the Margites — if indeed it is his — he writes somewhat thus:

For most make Homer an Egyptian.

" And the "Give a pledge, and ruin is at hand" — Cleomenes, in his work On Hesiod, says was uttered before by Homer in these words:

A kind of thief then the just man it seems has turned out to be, and it is likely that you acquired this idea from Homer.

And others cite Homer as a witness to the beguiling of gods by men, since he too said:

For, throwing in good standing with the gods, they have no lack of blessings to describe, which they affirm the gods give to pious men, even as the worthy Hesiod and Homer declare, the one that the gods make the oaks bear for the just:

Plato, in his ninth book on laws, very properly makes the same distinction, as Homer had done before him.

Nothing is more frequent in the writings of Homer than for men to be asked, if they are robbers?

Thus in Homer, in the agreement between Paris and Menelaus, that Helen should be given up to the conqueror, when compared with what follows, it is evident that by the conqueror is meant the combatant, who killed the other.

Hence the whole Necyia of Homer;

For while among the Greeks the most ancient class of the learned is that of the poets — since Homer and Hesiod lived before the founding of Rome, and Archilochus in the reign of Romulus — we Romans took up poetry later.

nor do I listen to Homer, who says Ganymede was carried off by the gods for his beauty, to serve Jove his drink:

This maybe illustrated by the ancient constitutions represented in Homer:

It is this citizen courage which inspires the heroes portrayed by Homer, like Diomede and Hector:

Hence Homer writes, he put strength in their spirit, and roused their might and their spirit, and bitter wrath up through his nostrils welled, and his blood boiled;

while in the second he sets out to accommodate the fables of Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer to what he himself had said in the first book about the immortal gods, so that even the most ancient poets, who never so much as suspected these things, may seem to have been Stoics.

For what is less to be approved than that the images of all men fall upon me — Homer, Archilochus, Romulus, Numa, Pythagoras, Plato — and not in the form they had:

nor indeed, as the fables tell, were they without wars and battles — not only as in Homer, when different gods defended two opposing armies from different sides, but even when they waged their own proper wars, as with the Titans, as with the Giants.

" Ennius, he says, filched this from Homer, and Virgil from Ennius.

he bought slaves at a great price, one to hold Homer by heart, another Hesiod;

you understand Homer when you hear "the poet.

In epic poetry Homer comes first, in my opinion;

Again, his accuser said that he often quoted the passage from Homer, showing how Odysseus:

But whatever man of the people he saw and found him shouting, him he drove with his sceptre and chid him with loud words:

the later, that which concerns Hesiod and Homer, is what I myself say.

for I suppose Hesiod and Homer flourished not more than four hundred years earlier than I;

But the poets who are said to have been earlier than these men were, in my opinion, later.

Then who could still contend with such a great host, led by Homer as general, and not make himself ridiculous?

And on this subject all the philosophers, except Parmenides, may be marshalled in one line—Protagoras and Heracleitus and Empedocles—and the chief poets in the two kinds of poetry, Epicharmus, in comedy, and in tragedy, Homer, who, in the line 0ceanus the origin of the gods, and Tethys their mother, has said that all things are the offspring of flow and motion;

And shall I add to this the all-compelling and crowning argument that Homer by the golden chain refers to nothing else than the sun, and means that so long as the heavens and the sun go round everything exists and is preserved, among both gods and men, but if the motion should stop, as if bound fast, everything would be destroyed and would, as the saying is, be turned upside down?

There is a sixth, an introductory, manner of deception that produces gods, according to which they reckon the twelve gods — of whom Hesiod sings his own theogony, and all that Homer treats of as theology.

And at your verses, Homer, I am amazed:

these two Dioscuri were mortal men, if Homer is enough to confirm what is said:

176-178), is that it was the aggregate production, not of one man, but of a gens or clan of Homeridæ, of whom Homer was the name-giving ancestor, real or supposed, the ‘divine or semi-divine eponymus or progenitor, in whose name and glory the individuality of every member of the gens was merged.

But, in point of fact, the order of ideas exhibited by both systems is relatively more modern than that which we can trace in the poems attributed to Homer.

Aristotle and the writers who have followed him suppose that the larger groups of men discernible in the twilight of history have somehow grown out of isolated families like that of the Homeric Cyclops.

For when he was stricken with blindness for speaking ill of Helen, he was not, like Homer, ignorant of the reason, but since he was educated, he knew it and straightway he writes the poem:

But some of the Homeridae, I believe, repeat two verses on Love from the spurious poems of Homer, one of which is very outrageous and not perfectly metrical.

Go and tell Lysias that you and I came down to the fountain and sacred place of the nymphs, and heard words which they told us to repeat to Lysias and anyone else who composed speeches, and to Homer or any other who has composed poetry with or without musical accompaniment, and third to Solon and whoever has written political compositions which he calls laws:

Homer remembered that he had been a peacock, when Ennius dreamed it;

Homer divided two gates for dreams, the horn one of truth, the ivory one of falsehood.

It has been believed that the unburied are not brought down to the lower regions before they have received their due rites — according to the Homeric Patroclus, demanding his funeral in dreams of Achilles, because he could not otherwise approach the gates of the lower world, the souls of the buried keeping him afar.

And Homer proves this most fully;

at any rate he has made no mention of the size of any others in the catalogue of the ships.

if on this point again we must believe the poetry of Homer, which it is natural that he, as a poet, set off on the side of exaggeration;

No, indeed, answered Niceratus;

Well, do you know any tribe of men, went on the other, more stupid than the rhapsodes?

But have you failed to observe, questioned Antisthenes, that the rhapsodes, too, all know these poems?

Homer has sung of his fame, and has said that of all the mailed chieftains

None could so shrewdly as he marshal the ranks for the fight.

If any one of the tragic poets who are to bring on their plays after the crowning should in a tragedy represent Thersites as crowned by the Greeks, no one of you would tolerate it, for Homer says he was a coward and a slanderer;

and you will find that Homer again and again in the Iliad says, of a thing that has not yet come to pass, Common Report came to the host;

Indeed, they say he will not even spare the poems of Homer or the names of the heroes, but will celebrate the friendship between Patroclus and Achilles, which, we are told, had its source in passion.

read first the verses about the vengeance on Hector.

First of all, Victory flies with golden wings, Eros is undoubtedly winged too, and Iris is compared by Homer to a timorous dove.

No, but the fact is all we poets are the assiduous slaves of the Muses, according to Homer.

I am he whose language is sweeter than honey, the zealous slave of the Muses, as Homer has it.

I used to think the tale of Homer a fable, when I went through that part of his poetry in which he relates the sufferings of Odysseus.

A forest of varied and all kinds of trees, growing of itself around it, becomes almost a fence to it, so that even the island of Calypso, which Homer plainly admired above all others for beauty, is small in comparison.

Often, when I was with you at headquarters, I wished, through your wisdom, to enter into the depth of Homer's madness.

"The poet Homer seemed to be present";

Unless indeed we think that Ennius did not so hear that whole "O piety of soul" — if only he dreamed it — as if he had heard it waking.

Read the panegyrics, Torquatus — not of those who were praised by Homer, not of Cyrus, not of Agesilaus, not of Aristides or Themistocles, not of Philip or Alexander;

But let us survey in our minds not these greatest arts — for lacking which men were by our ancestors called good-for-nothing — but I ask whether you think that — I do not say Homer, Archilochus, Pindar, but Phidias, Polyclitus, Zeuxis directed their arts to pleasure.

For thus they invite Ulysses — for I have translated, as some things of Homer's, so this very passage too:

Whether these things were established by the leaders of commonwealths for the use of life—that a single king should be thought to be in heaven, who by his nod, as Homer says, would turn all Olympus, and be held both king and father of all—great is the authority and many are the witnesses, if indeed it is granted that all are to be called many, that the nations have so agreed, plainly by the decree …

and as for Homer, those who put him latest set him about thirty years before the age of Lycurgus.