Homeric Moments Quotes

“READING HOMER’S POEMS is one of the purest, most inexhaustible pleasures life has to offer—a secret somewhat too well kept in our time.”
― Eva Brann, Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad

“Odysseus is the statesman of the Iliad, the man in the middle, keeping what balance he can among the parties. He shows himself at Troy, as later on Ithaca, as a firm conservative, in the sense that he props up the status quo—in this case, his insufficient chief. In his own poem a complementary side to his law-and-order propensity will show itself: a wide and deep imagination. The man of order, balance, and tradition, the centrist par excellence in public life, is a vividly imagining free spirit in his inner life.”
― Eva Brann, Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad

“Did the gods once mingle with humankind, or is Homer a visionary madman, or, what is worse, a mere poet, a maker-up of beautiful falsities, an elegant liar? I shall grapple with that perplexity, only to emerge as I went in, in a cloud of unknowing, if perhaps a little the wiser.”
― Eva Brann, Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad