Iliad

For whatever meal he wishes to praise he calls 'a meal to the heart's content'—the kind able to furnish 'might,' that is, strength.

Again then we shall request Homer and the other poets not to portray Achilles, the son of a goddess, as, Lying now on his side, and then again on his back, And again on his face, and then rising up and Drifting distraught on the shore of the waste unharvested ocean, nor clutching with both hands the sooty dust and strewing it over his head, nor as weeping and lamenting in the measure and manner at …

But since, dear comrade, after thee I go Beneath the earth, I will not bury thee Till here I bring thee Hector’ s head and arms, The spoils of that proud prince who took thy life.

Reasonably, then, have you yourselves called them idols and demons, since Homer too, honouring even Athena herself and the rest of the gods with wickedness, styled them demons:

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

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.

So already they write of the aegis of the poetic Zeus that it is terrible, "about which on all sides Fear is wreathed;

And so not unskillfully does Dionysius of Heraclea argue against those words which Achilles in Homer complains, in this manner, I think:

I am afraid mine, most likely, is a case that fits not your version, Socrates, but Homer’s—a dolt coming unbidden to the banquet of a scholar.

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

For to me it comes to mind to say the saying of Diomedes:

but, until philology has effected a complete analysis of the Sanskrit literature, our best sources of knowledge are undoubtedly the Greek Homeric poems, considered of course not as a history of actual occurrences, but as a description, not wholly idealised, of a state of society known to the writer.

This is in the story of the Prowess of Diomedes, where the verses run as follows:

For what is in the Iliad of Homer of the reports of the gods and their legends did not hinder the scholars from sifting it and distinguishing within it between history, religion and legend.

I dreamed that a beautiful, fair woman, clothed in white raiment, came to me and called me and said, Socrates, on the third day thou wouldst come to fertile Phthia.

You will marvel, I say, when you observe "the son of Atreus and Priam, and Achilles fierce against them both.

they will utter something you might think the mark of a great spirit, as did Gaius Caesar, who, angry at the heavens because a thunderstorm was drowning out the pantomimes—whom he imitated more zealously than he watched—and because his revelry was frightened by lightnings (very ill-aimed ones, at that), called Jupiter to battle, and that to the death, shouting out that Homeric line:

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.

" Of the lines of Homer he holds fast to this one only, that "the rule of many is not good;

The gods of Olympus sided with the abducer of Brisēis;

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;