Homeric Sentence Examples

This advantage, recalled by an old though erroneous 1 Servus is not cognate with servare, as has often been supposed; it is really related to the Homeric E'lpepos and the verb Etpw, with which the Latin sero is to be connected.

We find slavery fully established in the Homeric period.

Rendel Harris (1899) advocated the view that the Gospel of Nicodemus, as we possess it, is merely a prose version of the Gospel of Nicodemus written originally in Homeric centones as early as the 2nd century.

In the Homeric poems Laconia appears as the realm of an Achaean prince, Menelaus, whose capital was perhaps Therapne on the left bank of the Eurotas, S.E.

There has been considerable discussion as to the identification of the Homeric lotus.

Henry suggests that the Homeric lotus was really the nroa of Strabo, i.e.

History Of Medicine Medicine a Portrayed in the Homeric Poems. - In the state of society pictured by Homer it is clear that medicine has already had a history.

The Homeric heroes themselves are represented as having considerable skill in surgery, and as able to attend to ordinary wounds and injuries.

There is no sign in the Homeric poems of the subordination of medicine to religion which is seen in ancient Egypt and India, nor are priests charged, as they were in those countries, with medical functions - all circumstances which throw grave doubts on the commonly received opinion that medicine derived its origin in all countries from religious observances.

Although the actual organization of medicine among the Homeric Greeks was thus quite distinct from religion, the worship of Asclepius (or Aesculapius) as the god of healing demands some notice.

The inhabitants of Ethiopia, partly perhaps owing to their honourable mention in the Homeric poems, attracted the attention of many Greek researchers, from Democritus onwards.

Such are the main facts of the Leto legend in its common literary form, which is due especially to the two Homeric hymns to Apollo.

He had also contemplated some addition to the Homeric studies which he had always loved, but this design was never carried into effect, for he was summoned once again from his quiet life of study and devotion to the field of public controversy.

The Homeric Dorians of Crete were also interpreted by Andron and others (3rd century) as an advance-guard of this sea-borne migration, and as having separated from the other Dorians while still in Histiaeotis.

But in proportion as an earlier date has become more probable for Homer, the hypothesis of Ionic origin has become less tenable, and the belief better founded (I) that the poems represent accurately a welldefined phase of culture in prehistoric Greece, and (2) that this " Homeric " or " Achaean " phase was closed by some such general catastrophe as is presumed by the legends.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo evidently combines two different versions, one of the approach of Apollo from the north by land, and the other of the introduction of his votaries from Crete.

In the Homeric poems Corinth is a mere dependency of Mycenae; nor does it figure prominently in the tradition of the Dorian migrations.

The doubts thus cast upon the age when the Homeric poems first assumed the fixed form of writing were closely associated with the universal scepticism as to the historical accuracy of any traditions whatever regarding the early history of Greece.

Schliemann may or may not have been correct in identifying one of the seven cities that he unearthed at Hissarlik as the fabled Troy itself, but at least his efforts sufficed to give verisimilitude to the Homeric story.

But even were direct evidence of the knowledge of the art of writing in Greece of the early day altogether lacking, none but the hardiest sceptic could doubt, in the light of recent archaeological discoveries elsewhere, that the inhabitants of ancient Hellas of the "Homeric Age" must have shared with their contemporaries the capacity to record their thought in written words.

Its chief interest lies in the fact that (together with Dares Phrygius's De excidio Trojae) it was the source from which the Homeric legends were introduced into the romantic literature of the middle ages.

Mantineia is mentioned in the Homeric catalogue of ships, but in early Greek times existed only as a cluster of villages inhabited by a purely agricultural community.

Cicero calls his style "copious and polished," Quintilian, "sweet, pure and flowing"; Longinus says he was "the most Homeric of historians"; Dionysius, his countryman, prefers him to Thucydides, and regards him as combining in an extraordinary degree the excellences of sublimity, beauty and the true historical method of composition.

It is impossible to adopt the view that the Homeric poets turned the rude shepherd-god of Arcadia into a messenger, in order to provide him with a place in the Olympian circle.

The Homeric epithet 'ApyEtybO rqs, which the Greeks interpreted as "the slayer of Argus," inventing a myth to account for Argus, is explained as originally an epithet of the wind (apyEO-Tris), which clears away the mists (apyos, q5aivco).

In later accounts (and even in the Odyssey) Ares' character is somewhat toned down; thus, in the "Homeric" hymn to Ares, he is addressed as the assistant of Themis (Justice), the enemy of tyrants, and leader of the just.

In 1873 Dr Murray published a Manual of Mythology, and in the following year contributed to the Contemporary Review two articles - one on the Homeric question - which led to a friendship with Mr Gladstone, the other on Greek painters.

Zoilus appears to have been at one time a follower of Isocrates, but subsequently a pupil of Polycrates, whom he heard at Athens, where he was a teacher of rhetoric. Zoilus was chiefly known for the acerbity of his attacks on Homer (which gained him the name of Homeromastix, "scourge of Homer"), chiefly directed against the fabulous element in the Homeric poems. Zoilus also wrote against Isocrates and Plato, who had attacked the style of Lysias of which he approved.

He regarded Homer as the source of all wisdom and knowledge indeed, his description of Greece is largely drawn from Apollodorus's commentary on the Homeric " Catalogue of Ships " - and treated Herodotus with undeserved contempt.

She does not appear in Homer, although according to Xanthus (regarded by some as a fictitious personage), to whom Stesichorus was indebted for much in his Oresteia, she was identical with the Homeric Laodice, and was called Electra because she remained so long unmarried ('A-MKTpa).

This is the case with the Homeric poems, the ascertainment of the original form of which is a task beyond the powers of criticism.

This sceptical conclusion, the contrary of that drawn by Leibnitz from the harmony of thought and style pervading the works, shows us that the Homeric question has been followed by the Aristotelian question.

This is supported by the myth of his fall from heaven, and by the fact that, according to the Homeric tradition, his father was Zeus, the heaven-god.

In epic poetry Hephaestus is rather a comic figure, and his limping gait provokes "Homeric laughter" among the gods.

This last name indicates the general character of Ithacan history (if history it can be called) in modern and indeed in ancient times; for the fame of the island is almost solely due to its position in the Homeric story of Odysseus.

Ithaca, according to the Homeric epos, was the royal seat and residence of King Odysseus.

The island is incidentally described with no small variety of detail, picturesque and topographical; the Homeric localities for which counterparts have been sought are Mount Neritos, Mount Neion, the harbour of Phorcys, the town and palace of Odysseus, the fountain of Arethusa, the cave of the Naiads, the stalls of the swineherd Eumaeus, the orchard of Laertes, the Korax or Raven Cliff and the island Asteris, where the suitors lay in ambush for Telemachus.

Ddrpfeld has suggested that the Homeric Ithaca is not the island which was called Ithaca by the later Greeks, but must be identified with Leucas (Santa Maura, q.v.).

He succeeds in fitting the Homeric topography to this latter island, and suggests that the name may have been transferred in consequence of a migration of the inhabitants.

There is no doubt that Leucas fits the Homeric descriptions much better than Ithaca; but, on the other hand, many scholars maintain that it is a mistake to treat the imaginary descriptions of a poet as if they were portions of a guide-book, or to look, in the author of the Odyssey, for a close familiarity with the geography of the Ionian islands.

According to the local tradition Corcyra was the Homeric island of Scheria, and its earliest inhabitants the Phaeacians.

It is curious that Avenarius should have brought forward this artificial hypothesis as the natural view of the world, without reflecting that on the one hand the majority of mankind believes that the environment (R) exists, has existed, and will exist, without being a counterpart of any living being as central part (C); and that on the other hand it is so far from being natural to man to believe that sensation and thought (E) are different from, and merely dependent on, his body (C), that throughout the Homeric poems, though soul is required for other purposes, all thinking as well as sensation is regarded as a purely bodily operation.

Its period of greatest splendour was probably between the 14th and 12th centuries B.C.; in Homeric and subsequent times it was usually subject to Argos.

The relation of the palace at Tiryns to those described in the Homeric poems has given rise to much discussion.

It is now generally recognized that, while the general character of the palace at Tiryns is invaluable as illustrating the type of house in the mind of the Homeric poet, it is a mistake to appeal to it for the explanation of details of arrangement such as probably varied considerably according to the conditions and requirements in different cases.

A physiognomical study of the Homeric heroes is given by Malalas, Chronogr.

The fact that they copied the form in which the heathen revelations were conveyed (Greek hexameter verses) and the Homeric language is evidence of a degree of external Hellenization, which is an important fact in the history of post-exilic Judaism.

It seems to be much more prominent than iron in the Homeric poems; but they tell us only of one region at one age.

In the Homeric hymn to Demeter, Triptolemus is simply one of the nobles of Eleusis, who was instructed by the goddess in her rites and ceremonies.

See the Homeric hymn to Demeter, 153,474; Ovid, 1l?etam.

He divided the Homeric poems into books (with capitals for the Iliad, and small letters for the Odyssey), and possibly was the author of the calculation of the days of the Iliad in the Tabula Iliaca.

Our earlier notices of Sicily, of Sicels and Sicans, in the Homeric poems and elsewhere, are vague and legendary.

In the Homeric poems (1000 B.C.) the Achaeans are the master race in Greece; they are represented both in Homer and in all later traditions as having come into Greece about three generations before the Trojan war (1184 B.C.), i.e.

The culture of the Homeric Achaeans corresponds to a large extent with that of the early Iron Age of the upper Danube (Hallstatt) and to the early Iron Age of upper Italy (Villanova).

In the earliest existing monument of the Hellenic genius, the Homeric poems, one may already observe that regulative sense of form and proportion, which shaped the later achievements of the race in the intellectual and artistic spheres.

Ennius prided himself especially on being the first to form the strong speech of Latium into the mould of the Homeric hexameter in place of the old Saturnian metre.

The Homeric epithet 130wires may have meant "cow-faced" to the earliest worshippers of Hera, though by Homer and the later Greeks it was understood as "large-eyed," like the cow.

The colossi known to the Greeks by the name of the Homeric hero Memnon, which look over the western plain of Thebes, represent this king and were placed before the entrance of his funerary temple, the rest of which has disappeared.

As a Homeric scholar, of conservative views, he took a high rank.

His Homer and the Epic appeared in 1893; a new prose translation of The Homeric Hymns in 1899, with essays literary and mythological, in which parallels to the Greek myths are given from the traditions of savage races; and his Homer and his Age in 1906.

Doerpfeld sees in the crude settlements in Levkas the works of Homeric Achaeans, and continues to identify the island with Ithaca.

It is then natural that the Homeric poems refer to Phrygia in the terms above described, and make Priam's wife a Phrygian woman.

Goethe has here taken a simple story of village life, mirrored in it the most pregnant ideas of his time, and presented it with a skill which may well be called Homeric; but he has discriminated with the insight of genius between the Homeric method of reproducing the heroic life of primitive Greece and the same method as adapted to the commonplace happenings of 18th-century Germany.

The early history of metal-working in Greece is extremely obscure, and archaeologists are divided in opinion even on so important a question as the relative use of bronze and iron in the Homeric age.

Though eclipsed in the Homeric age, when it appears as the seat of Diomedes, by the later foundation of Mycenae, it regained its predominance after the invasion of the Dorians, who seem to have occupied this site in considerable force.

The most poetical account of his birth and life is given in the so-called Homeric hymn To Pan.

In the Homeric poems eastern Messenia is represented as under the rule of Menelaus of Sparta, while the western coast is under the Neleids of Pylos, but after Menelaus's death the Messenian frontier was pushed eastwards as far as Taygetus.

Equally obscure is the relation between the Paphlagonians and the Eneti or Heneti (mentioned in connexion with them in the Homeric catalogue) who were supposed in antiquity to be the ancestors of the Veneti, who dwelt at the head of the Adriatic. But no trace is found in historical times of any tribe of that name in Asia Minor.

She is not mentioned in Homer, although the hearth is recognized as a place of refuge for suppliants; this seems to show that her worship was not universally acknowledged at the time of the Homeric poems. In post-Homeric religion she is one of the twelve Olympian deities, but, as the abiding goddess of the household, she never leaves Olympus.

Thucydides, who quotes this passage to show the ancient character of the Delian festival, seems to have no doubt of the Homeric authorship of the hymn.

Hence doubtless the claim of Colophon to be the native city of Homer - a claim supported in the early times of Homeric learning by the Colophonian poet and grammarian Antimachus.

No legend claims for Miletus even a visit from Homer, or a share in the authorship of any Homeric poem.

At Athens there was a law that the Homeric poems should be recited (1 5446a-eat) on every occasion of the Panathenaea.

On the one hand, it seemed to follow from the existence of such a family that Homer was a mere " eponymus," or mythical ancestor; on the other hand, it became easy to imagine the Homeric poems handed down orally in a family whose hereditary occupation it was to recite them, possibly to add new episodes from time to time, or to combine their materials in new ways, as their poetical gifts permitted.

But, although there is no reason to doubt the existence of a family of " Homeridae," it is far from certain that they had anything to do with Homeric poetry.

If it proves anything, it proves that Cynaethus, who was a Chian and a rhapsodist, made no claim to Homeric descent.

And although we hear of " descendants of Creophylus " as in possession of the Homeric poems, there is no similar story about descendants of Homer himself.

Let us now compare these data with the account given in the Homeric poems. The word " rhapsode " does not yet exist; we hear only of the singer " (aoc56s), who does not carry a wand or laurel-branch, but the lyre (40pyry), with which he accompanies his "song."

Yet in several respects the conditions under which the singer finds himself in the house of a chieftain like Odysseus or Alcinous are more in harmony with the character of Homeric poetry than those of the later rhapsodic contests.

The difference made by substituting the wand or branch of laurel for the lyre of the Homeric singer is a slighter one, though not without significance.

For it is difficult to believe that the Homeric poems were ever " sung " in the strict sense of the word.

Probably the poets of the Homeric school - that which dealt with war and adventure - were the genuine descendants of minstrels whose " lays " or " ballads " were the amusement of the feasts in an earlier heroic age; whereas the Hesiodic compositions were non-lyrical from the first, and were only in verse because that was the universal form of literature.

Failing external testimony, the time and place of the Homeric poems can only be determined (if at all) by internal evidence.

While the political centre of Homeric Greece is at Mycenae, the real centre is rather to be found in Boeotia.

Even the Cyclades - Naxos, Paros, Melos - are unknown to the Homeric world.

Again, the worship of Dionysus, and of Demeter and Persephone, is mainly or wholly post-Homeric. The greatest difference, however, lies in the absence of hero-worship from the Homeric order of things.

Murray,' Homeric art does not rise above the stage of decoration, applied to objects in common use; while in point of style it is characterized by a richness and variety of ornament which is in the strongest contrast to the simplicity of the best periods.

Now, without counting the Homeric poems - which doubtless had exceptional advantages in their fame and popularity - we find a body of literature dating from the 8th century B.C. to which the theory of oral transmission is surely inapplicable.

It seems probable therefore that the introduction of the alphabet is not later than the composition of the Homeric poems.

The result of these various considerations seems to be that the age which we may call the Homeric - the age which is brought before us in vivid outlines in the Iliad and Odyssey - lies beyond the earliest point to which history enables us to penetrate.

It would be impossible to give the evidence in full without writing a Homeric grammar, but a few specimens may be of interest.

In this point therefore the Homeric language is manifestly older.

Of the poetical aorists in Attic the larger part are also Homeric. Others are not really Attic at all, but borrowed from earlier Aeolic and Doric poetry.

In fact, however, the Homeric subjunctive is almost quite " regular," though the rule which it obeys is a different one from the Attic. It may be summed up by saying that the subjunctive takes or when the indicative has o or and not otherwise.

This letter, however, died out earlier in Ionic than in most dialects, and there is no proof that the Homeric poems were ever written with it.

The points that have been mentioned, to which many others might be added, make it clear that the Homeric and Attic dialects are separated by differences which affect the whole structure of the language, and require a considerable time for their development.

It has been thought indeed that the Homeric dialect was a mixed one, mainly Ionic, but containing Aeolic and even Doric forms; this, however, is a mistaken view of the processes of language.

There are doubtless many Homeric forms which were unknown to the later Ionic and Attic, and which are found in Aeolic or other dialects.

Just as modern poetical Italian uses many older grammatical forms peculiar to itself, so the language of poetry, even in Homeric times, had formed a deposit (so to speak) of archaic grammar.

There were doubtless poets before Homer, as well as brave men before Agamemnon; and indeed the formation of a poetical dialect such as the Homeric must have been the work of several generations.

The use of that dialect (instead of Aeolic) by the Boeotian poet Hesiod, in a kind of poetry which was not of the Homeric type, tends to the conclusion that the literary ascendancy of the epic dialect was anterior to the Iliad and Odyssey, and independent of the influence exercised by these poems.

To what local variety of Achaean Homeric Greek belonged it is idle to ask.

It will be enough to observe that in the earliest elegiac poets, such as Archilochus, Tyrtaeus and Theognis, reminiscences of Homeric language and thought meet us on every page.

With this process of expansion and development (so to speak) of Homeric themes is combined the addition of new characters.

The first name is that of Theagenes of Rhegium, contemporary of Cambyses (525 B.C.), who is said to have founded the " new grammar " (the older " grammar " being the art of reading and writing), and to have been the inventor of the allegorical interpretations by which it was sought to reconcile the Homeric mythology with the morality and speculative ideas of the 6th century B.C. The same attitude in the " ancient quarrel of poetry and philosophy " was soon afterwards taken by Anaxagoras; and after him by his pupil Metrodorus of Lampsacus, who explained away all the gods, and even the heroes, as elementary substances and forces (Agamemnon as the upper air, &c.).

The Thebaid of Antimachus, however, was not popular, and seems to have been a great storehouse of mythological learning rather than a poem of the Homeric school.

In this way the great Alexandrian school of Homeric criticism began with Zenodotus, the first chief of the museum, and was continued by Aristophanes and Aristarchus.

In the same spirit he looked upon the ideas and beliefs of Homer as a consistent whole, which might be determined from the evidence of the poems. He noticed especially the difference between the stories known to Homer and those given by later poets, and made many comparisons between Homeric and later manners, arts and institutions.

Not that the " Wolfian theory " of the Homeric poems is directly supported by anything in the Scholia; the immediate object of the Prolegomena was not to put forward that theory, but to elucidate the new and remarkable conditions under which the text of Homer had to be settled, viz.

Everything in short was ripe for the reception of a book that brought together, with masterly ease and vigour, the old and the new Homeric learning, and drew from it the historical proof that Homer was no single poet, writing according to art and rule, but a name which stood for a golden age of the true spontaneous poetry of genius and nature.

The part of the Prolegomena which deals with the original form of the Homeric poems occupies pp. xl.

The vast commentary of Eustathius (of the 12th century) marks a third stage in the progress of ancient Homeric learning.

The effect of Wolf's Prolegomena was so overwhelming that, although a few protests were made at the time, the true Homeric controversy did not begin till after Wolf's death (1824).

In the later part of the same series of discussions (1837), and in his chief work (Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen, 1852), he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems, and their relation to the other epics of the Trojan cycle.

Wolf had argued that if the cyclic writers had known the Iliad and Odyssey which we possess, they would have imitated the unity of structure which distinguishes these two poems. The result of Welcker's labours was to show that the Homeric poems had influenced both the form and the substance of epic poetry.

Some parts of the Iliad, moreover, seemed to him to be older than the poem on the wrath of Achilles; and thus in addition to the " Homeric " and " post-Homeric " matter he distinguished a pre-Homeric " element.

If one of the two is to be rejected it must be the tenth, which is certainly the less Homeric. It relates a picturesque adventure, conceived in a vein more approaching that of comedy than any other part of the Iliad.

When we are satisfied that each of the great Homeric poems is either wholly or mainly the work of a single poet, a question remains which has been matter of controversy in ancient as well as modern times - Are they the work of the same poet?

A few words remain to be said on the style and general character of the Homeric poems, and on the comparisons which may be made between Homer and analogous poetry in other countries.

Like the French epics, Homeric poetry is indigenous, and is distinguished by this fact, and by the ease of movement and the simplicity which result from it, from poets such as Virgil, Dante and Milton.

The literature of the " Homeric Question " begins practically with Wolf's Prolegomena (Halle, 1795).

The character of Penelope is less favourable in late writers than in the Homeric story.

But behind Homer stretches the dim scene of pre-Hellenic religion, and the conflict of elements " Pelasgic, and Hellenic, out of which the Homeric religion emerged; and beneath the Homeric religion how many features of the' religion of ghosts and nature-spirits survived in popular usage and the lower cults!

The Homeric Erinyes chastise outrages on the poor, injuries to guests, failure to show the respect due to parents or to recognize the rights of age, in this life; only on perjury does the divine doom extend to the next.

From very early times the Homeric poems found a home and admirers there; and to Ephesus belong the earliest elegiac poems of Greece, the war songs of Callinus, who flourished in the 7th century B.C. and was the model of Tyrtaeus.

It is difficult to extract any historical fact out of this maze of myths; the various groups cannot be fully co-ordinated, and a further perplexing feature is the neglect of Thebes in the Homeric poems. At most it seems safe to infer that it was one of the first Greek communities to be drawn together within a fortified city, that it owed its importance in prehistoric as in later days to its military strength, and that its original "Cadmean" population was distinct from other inhabitants of Boeotia such as the Minyae of Orchomenus.

According to the Homeric story he was absent from Mycenae when his father returned from the Trojan War and was murdered by Aegisthus.

In the Homeric Oresteia the soul of the murdered wife has no claim to vengeance, and Orestes rules unmolested in Argos.

Ancient writers spoke of all these Gauls as Cimbri, and identified them with the Cimmerians of earlier date, who in Homeric times dwelt on the ocean next to the Laestrygones, in a region of wintry gloom, but where the sun set not in summer.

In fact the later Greek religion did not advance much above the high-water mark of the Homeric, although the poets and philosophers deepened certain of its nobler traits.

Again the Homeric Zeus is fully anthropomorphic; but in many domains of Greek religion we discover the traces of theriomorphism, when the deity was regarded as often incarnate in the form of an animal or the animal might itself be worshipped in its own right.

The Homeric view of him as the All-Father is a high spiritual concept, but one of which many savage religions of our own time are capable.

There he can reconstruct the splendour of that Minoan age to which Homeric poems look back, as the Germanic epics looked back to Rome or Verona.

The epics in general show a mixture of Homeric, Ionic and Doric forms. The Bucolics, Mimes, and the " Marriage-song of Helen" (xviii.) are in Doric, with occasional forms from other dialects.

His treatment of this may be compared both with Homeric usage and that of other Alexandrian poets, e.g.

In the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite she is described as ruling over all living things on earth, in the air, and in the water, even the gods being subject to her influence.

He collaborated with his father Apollinaris the Elder in reproducing the Old Testament in the form of Homeric and Pindaric poetry, and the New after the fashion of Platonic dialogues, when the emperor Julian had forbidden Christians to teach the classics.

The other incidents in which he appears in a purely triumphal character are his transforming into dolphins the Tyrrhene pirates who attacked him, as told in the Homeric hymn to Dionysus and represented on the monument of Lysicrates at Athens, and his part in the war of the gods against the giants.

In the legend, as set forth in the Homeric hymn to Apollo and the ode of Callimachus to Delos, Apollo is the son of Zeus and Leto.

It well deserves the epithet "craggy" (rraorraX6Ecraa) of the Homeric hymn.

The Homeric and later conception of Artemis, though by no means the original one, may be noticed first.

But there is no trace of Artemis as such in the epic period, and the Homeric hymn knows nothing of her identification with Selene.

He has stated in his autobiography that through all his early years of struggle, when he was successively grocer's apprentice at Fiirstenberg, cabin-boy on the "Dorothea" bound for Venezuela, and, after her wreck, office attendant and then book-keeper in Amsterdam, he nourished a passion for the Homeric story and an ambition to become a great linguist.

After travels in Greece, Tunisia, India, China and Japan, and writing a short sketch of the last two countries, he took his large fortune to Greece in 1868, and proceeded to visit Homeric sites.

Numerous quotations and fragments still exist, chiefly in the Homeric scholiasts and Stephanus of Byzantium.

It is foreign to the Homeric poems, and must have been introduced into Greece after their composition.

Or, again, there is nothing not explicable and natural in the conception of the Olympian Zeus as represented by the great chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia, or in the Homeric conception of Zeus as a god who " turns everywhere his shining eyes " and beholds all things.

One student, like Theagenes, would see a physical philosophy underlying Homeric legends.

They will mistake this tradition of local origin for one of actual parentage, and will come to believe that, like certain Homeric heroes, they are the sons of a river (now personified), or of a mountain, or, like a tribe mentioned by Garcilasso de la Vega, that they are descended from the sea.

The prayer of the Melanesian is on rather a higher religious level than that of the Homeric hero.

The oldest sources as literary documents are the Homeric and Hesiodic poems. In the Iliad and Odyssey the gods and goddesses are beautiful, powerful and immortal anthropomorphic beings.

The other chief Homeric deities are Apollo and Artemis, children of Zeus by Leto, a mortal mother raised to divinity.

In the Iliad 9 will be found some of the crudest Homeric myths.

The Homeric hymn to Helios, as Max Muller observes, " looks on the sun as a half-god, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth."

Euripides in the Cyclops essentially follows the Homeric account.

The same is true of the Homeric epics wherein the Pleiades, Hyades, Ursa major, Orion and Bootes are mentioned, and also of the stars and constellations mentioned in Job.

On one side Prometheus arranged the best parts of the ox covered with offal, on the other the bones covered with fat, as the meat was covered in Homeric sacrifices.

If, in the Homeric age, men found it so hard to get the seed of fire, what must the difficulty have been in the earliest dawn of the art of fire-making?

What better test case to use for this purpose than Homeric hexameters?

An enumeration of George Sand's novels would constitute a Homeric catalogue, and it must suffice to note only the most typical and characteristic. She contracted with Buloz to supply him with a stated amount of copy for the modest retaining fee of 160 a year, and her editor testifies that the tale of script was furnished with the punctuality of a notary.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo of Delos (7th century) describes an Ionian population in the Cyclades with a loose religious league about the Delian sanctuary.

Alexander himself first visited the site of Troy and there went through those dramatic acts of sacrifice to the Ilian Athena, assumption of the shield believed to be that of Achilles and offerings to the great Homeric dead, which are significant of the poetic glamour shed, in the young king's mind, over the whole enterprise, and which men will estimate differently according to the part they assign to imagination in human affairs.

There is strong reason for believing the story that he first collected the Homeric poems and that his was the text which ultimately prevailed (see Homer).

According to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Persephone, while gathering flowers on the Nysian plain (probably here a purely mythical locality), was carried off by Hades (Pluto), the god of the lower world, with the connivance of Zeus (see also Proserpine).

The curtain-wall and towers of the Mycenaean citadel, its gate with heraldic lions, and the great "Treasury of Atreus" had borne silent witness for ages before Schliemann's time; but they were supposed only to speak to the Homeric, or at farthest a rude Heroic beginning of purely Hellenic, civilization.

The Homeric heroes themselves are repre sented as having considerable skill in surgery, and as able to attend to ordinary wounds and injuries, but there is also a professional class, represented by Machaon and Podalirius, the two sons of Asclepius, who are treated with great respect.

In the Homeric poems the Aethiopes are the furthest of mankind both eastward and westward; the gods go to their banquets and probably the Sun sets in their country.

A theory has been proposed by Professor DSrpfeld that Leucas is the island described in the Odyssey under the name of Ithaca; in support of this theory he quotes the fact that the Homeric description of the island and its position, and also the identification of such sites as the palace of Odysseus, the harbour of Phorcys, the grotto of the Nymphs and the island Asteris,.

In 1887 he published his translation of the Odyssey, which had many of the qualities and defects of his Aeneid, and is much more interesting as an experiment than valuable as a "Homeric echo."

The Hallstatt culture is that of the Homeric Achaeans (see Achaeans), but as the brooch (along with iron, cremation of the dead, the round shield and the geometric ornament) passed down into Greece from central Europe, and as brooches are found in the lower town at Mycenae, 1350 B.C., they must have been invented long before that date in central Europe.

The result of the notices now collected is to show that the early history of epic recitation consists of (r) passages in the Homeric hymns showing that poets contended for the prize at the great festivals, (2) the passing mention in Herodotus of rhapsodists at Sicyon, and (3) a law at Athens, of unknown date, regulating the recitation at the Panathenaea.

It seems, then, that if we imagine Homer as a singer in a royal house of the Homeric age, but with more freedom regarding the limits of his subject, and a more tranquil audience than is allowed him in the rapid movement of the Odyssey, we shall probably not be far from the truth.

The chief industries of Homeric times are those of the carpenter (TEKro v),, the worker in leather (oKVTaroµos), the smith or worker in metal (XaXKeus) - whose implements are the hammer and pincers - and the potter (Kepa,ueis); also spinning and weaving, which were carried on by the women.

The Homeric uses of tip and are different in several respects from the Attic, the general result being that the Homeric syntax is more elastic. And yet it is perfectly definite and precise.

The Homeric dialect has passed into New Ionic and Attic by gradual but ceaseless development of the same kind as that which brought about the change from Vedic to classical Sanskrit, or from old high German to the present dialects of Germany.

Again, the account of the Hipparchus is contradicted by Diogenes Laertius, who says that Solon provided for the due recitation of the Homeric poems. The only good authorities as to this point are the orators Lycurgus and Isocrates, who mention the law prescribing the recitation, but do not say when or by whom it was enacted.

In the Homeric poems Cephalonia is generally supposed to be mentioned under the name of Same, and its inhabitants, among the subjects of Ulysses, to be designated Cephallenes (see, however, under Ithaca).

In addition to the great Homeric gods, the poet knows a whole " Olympian consistory " of deities, nymphs, nereids, sea-gods and goddesses, river-gods, Iris the rainbow goddess, Sleep, Demeter who lay with a mortal, Aphrodite the goddess of love, wife of Hephaestus and leman of Ares, and so forth.

Epic Simile Extended or elaborate simile; sometimes known as the Homeric simile.

Bloom 's day is paralleled to the wanderings of Odysseus in the Homeric epic.

Larissa, written Larisa on ancient coins and inscriptions, is near the site of the Homeric Argissa.

Even in the Homeric poems, which belong to an age when the great Minoan civilization was already decadent, the Cretans appear as the only Greek people who attempted to compete with the Phoenicians as bold and adventurous navigators.

But their claims to be the principal authors of the Aegean remains grew fainter with every fresh Aegean discovery, and every new light thrown on their own proper products; with the Cretan revelations they ceased altogether to be considered except by a few Homeric enthusiasts.

Whether either plan suits the "Homeric palace" does not affect the present question.

The Homeric poems scarcely mention Attica, and the legends, though numerous, are rarely of direct historical value.

In fact, it does for the Robin Hood cycle what a few years before Sir Thomas Malory had done for the Arthurian romances - what in the 6th century B.C. Peisistratus is said to have done for the Homeric poems.

A Passion History compiled out of Homeric verses, which Zonaras attributed to Eudocia, is perhaps of different authorship.

The Homeric poems (12th - 10th centuries) know of Dorians only in Crete, with the obscure epithet TpexaiKes, and no hint of their origin.

We would recite it to each other like a Homeric epic.