Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything.

I suppose I'd have to say that my favourite author is Homer. After Homer's Ilaid, I'd name The Odyssey, and then I'd mention a number of plays of Euripides.

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitches. It's as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the 'Iliad' while playing a lyre.

Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.

To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

Over the wine-dark sea.

Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.

In the ancient times, bards went around singing the epics, which were storehouses of philosophy.

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ileum?

The ancient world is always accessible, no matter what culture you come from. I remember when I was growing up in India and I read the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.'

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.

Homer was able to give us no information relating to the truth, for he wrote of human rather than divine things.

The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

The earliest form in which romances appear is that of a rude kind of verse.