Homer

For this reason Homer too says that true kings are nurtured of Zeus and like Zeus in counsel, and he declared that Minos, who had the greatest renown for justice, became the companion of Zeus.

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

that not all hold the sceptre and this office from Zeus, but only the good man, and on no other just terms than that he take counsel and have care for those he rules;

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

" 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:

So we praise the pilot of much experience, "who saw the cities of many men," and the physician who has come to be in the experience of many — by which some even mould the empiric.

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.

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.

Hence the whole Necyia of Homer;

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;

Do I seem to lay down a hard law for you, when the greatest of the Greek poets gave the right of weeping for one single day, when he said that even Niobe thought of food?

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

and it was partly by the prompting of Hermes, partly through his own self-restraint and avoidance of excessive indulgence in such things, that Odysseus was not turned into a pig.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

But perhaps the male gods alone among them rush after love-making, while "the female goddesses each abode at home for shame," says Homer — the goddesses being ashamed, out of their solemnity, to look upon Aphrodite taken in adultery.

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.

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.

as Homer has also shown, if he is sufficient authority for any one, and also, in [his account of] the transmission of the sceptre, he has mentioned that he

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;

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

My father was anxious to see me develop into a good man, said Niceratus, and as a means to this end he compelled me to memorize all of Homer;

But you have paid a good deal of money to Stesimbrotus, Anaximander, and many other Homeric critics, so that nothing of their valuable teaching can have escaped your knowledge.

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

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.

But that you may hear the sentiments of the poet in verse also, the clerk shall read to you the verses on this theme which Homer composed.

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.

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.

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.

But as for you, who parade in your declamations, I have given orders that there be furnished to you roof-beams equal in number to the soldiers who fought at Thermopylae, all of good length, and, in the words of your Homer, "casting long shadows";

"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.

If I were attempting, for the more special pur poses of the jurist, to express compendiously the characteristics of the situation in which mankind disclose themselves at the dawn of their history, I should be satisfied to quote a few verses from the Odyssey of Homer:

but the relations of Ulysses and Laertes in the Odyssey appear to show that, where extraordinary valour and sagacity were united in the son, the father in the decrepitude of age was deposed from the headship of the family.

” These lines are applied to the Cyclops, and it may not perhaps be an altogether fanciful idea when I suggest that the Cyclops is Homer’s type of an alien and less advanced civilisation;

Ita commercia victus gratia inventa est Homero Plinius probat.

Hence commerce was born out of necessity for the commodities of life, as Pliny shows by a citation from Homer.