Why Homer Matters Quotes

“Until the twentieth century, no one had any idea that Homer might have existed in this strange and immaterial form. It was the assumption that Homer, like other poets, wrote his poetry. Virgil, Dante and Milton were merely following in his footsteps. The only debate was over why these written poems were in places written so badly. Why had he not written them better?”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“In 1788, in Paris, he published the most important Greek text of the Iliad ever printed. Ten years earlier he had arrived in Venice, sent there by the enlightened instincts of the French crown, to trawl through the holdings of the great St. Mark’s library on the Piazzetta. Villoison was agog at what he found, and soon began writing ecstatic letters to his friends all over Europe. He had made the great discovery: a Byzantine edition of the Iliad that seemed to derive from the scholars who had worked on it in Alexandria in the second century BC, sifting the true text from the mass of alternative readings they had gathered in the great Ptolemaic library in the city. It was, Villoison wrote, the “germana et sincera lectio,” the real and uncorrupted reading.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Most people read Homer in those stupid eighteenth-century translations,” Gautier said calmly. “They make him sound like Marie-Antoinette nibbling biscuits in the Tuileries. But if you read him in Greek you can see he’s a monster, his people are monsters. The whole thing is like a dinner party for barbarians. They eat with their fingers. They put mud in their hair when they are upset. They spend half the time painting themselves.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“I thank God I met Homer again that summer. He was suddenly alongside me, a companion and an ally, the most truly reliable voice I had ever known. It was like discovering poetry itself, or the dead speaking. As I read and reread the Odyssey in translation, I suddenly felt that here was the unaffected truth, here was someone speaking about fate and the human condition in ways that other people only seem to approach obliquely; and that directness, that sense of nothing between me and the source, is what gripped me. I felt like asking, “Why has no one told me about this before?”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a preclassic, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“The purity of death holds no attraction for the Homeric Greeks. Their world is one in which the felt, sensed and shared reality, the reality of the human heart, is the only one worth having.”
― Adam Nicolson, The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters

“Homer then has the bard—a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means “popular with the people”—say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: “The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter.” The song, this poem, this story, is the divine purpose of the war. The war happened so that the poem could happen.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Homer then has the bard—a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means “popular with the people”—say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: “The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter.” The song, this poem, this story, is the divine”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“American gang members talk about themselves, their lives, their ambitions, their idea of fate, the role of violence and revenge, in ways that are strangely like the Greeks in the Iliad.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Or do you, like Achilles, believe in the dignity of love and the purity of honor as the only things that matter in the face of death?”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Do you, like Hector, think of your family above all and weaken your resolve by doing that?”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Do you, like Agamemnon, attempt to dominate your world?”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Iliad’s subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted Nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“the first objects to be designed with the sole purpose of killing another person.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“As the generation of leaves, so too is the generation of men. And as for leaves, the winds scatter some on the earth, But the new wood puts forth others, and spring comes again. So it is with men: as one generation is born, another dies.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“in 1944 the Germans executed brutal, slaughtering attacks on the people of mountain Crete.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“this was all evidence of the tradition at work, of Homer being more interested in epic music than its meaning.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“There are 201 words in the Iliad and the Odyssey that occur only once in Homer and never again in the whole of Greek literature.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“You can either do what your integrity tells you to do, or niftily find your way around the obstacles life throws in your path.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“The most intriguing aspect of the Hawara Homer, and other papyri of the same era, is how close they are to the text of Homer as it was transmitted to the Byzantine scholars who were assembling the Venetus A manuscript eight hundred years later.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence,”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles,”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“And such too is the grandeur of the dooms/We have imagined for the mighty dead.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Epic is different from life. The present moment might be seen as a blade, cutting the past from the present, severing now from then, but poetry binds the wounds that time inflicts.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters

“There are no oaths sworn between lions and men, nor do wolves and lambs come to some arrangement in their hearts. They are filled with endless, repetitive hate for each other. Just so, it is impossible for you and me to be friends, nor will there be any oaths between us till one or other is dead, and has glutted Ares, the god of war, who carries his tough leather shield, with his blood.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“Of about three thousand languages spoken today, seventy-eight have a written literature. The rest exist in the mind and the mouth. Language—man—is essentially oral.”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History

“These are the two possibilities for human life. You can either do what your integrity tells you to do, or niftily find your way around the obstacles life throws in your path. That is the great question the poems pose. Which will you be? Achilles or Odysseus, the monument of obstinacy and pride or the slippery trickster in whom nothing is certain and from whom nothing can be trusted? The singular hero or the ingenious man?”
― Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters: A History