Homer

” He then reminds him that Homer had praised Aeneas’s mastery of retreat.

And this puts me in mind of that rich gentleman of Rome, who had been solicitous, with very great expense, to procure men that were excellent in all sorts of science, whom he had always attending his person, to the end, that when among his friends any occasion fell out of speaking of any subject whatsoever, they might supply his place, and be ready to prompt him, one with a sentence of Seneca, another with a verse of Homer, and so forth, every one according to his talent;

This is not of the complexion of that which Homer makes to issue from the wounded gods.

‘Tis said that Homer had never more than one, Plato three, and Zeno, founder of the sect of Stoics, none at all.

And the sirens, in Homer, to allure Ulysses, and draw him within the danger of their snares, offered to give him knowledge.

Pyrrho, and other skeptics or epechists, whose dogmas are held by many of the ancients to be taken from Homer, the seven sages, and from Archilochus and Euripides, and to whose number these are added, Zeno, Democritus, and Xenophanes, say that they are yet upon the inquiry after truth.

Homer, their author, has equally laid the foundations of all the sects of philosophy, to show how indifferent it was which way we should choose.

Is it possible that Homer could design to say all that we make him say, and that he designed so many and so various figures, as that the divines, law-givers, captains, philosophers, and all sorts of men who treat of sciences, how variously and opposite soever, should indifferently quote him, and support their arguments by his authority, as the sovereign lord and master of all offices, works, and artisans, and counsellor-general of all enterprises?

and cannot easily be put out of the conceit that it was Homer’s design;

conceiving that Homer had made the Ocean and Thetis father and mother of the gods, to show us that all things are in a perpetual fluctuation, motion, and variation;

Observations on Julius Caesar’s Methods of Waging War ’Tis related of many great leaders that they have had certain books in particular esteem, as Alexander the Great, Homer;

One of them Homer:

and yet in this judgment we are not to forget that it is chiefly from Homer that Virgil derives his excellence, that he is guide and teacher;

Add the companions of the Muses, whose sceptre Homer has solely obtained.

Alexander the Great, having found a rich cabinet among Darius’s spoils, gave order it should be reserved for him to keep his Homer in, saying:

That wanton Alcibiades, having asked one, who pretended to learning, for a book of Homer, gave him a box of the ear because he had none, which he thought as scandalous as we should if we found one of our priests without a Breviary.

” replied he, “Homer, who was much poorer than thou art, keeps above ten thousand, though he is dead.

” What did Panaetius leave unsaid when he called Plato the Homer of the philosophers?

What Homer and Plato said of the Egyptians, that they were all physicians, may be said of all nations;

but if it be for my own particular (whatever Homer truly says, that modesty is a foolish virtue in an indigent person), I commonly commit it to a third person to blush for me, and deny those who employ me with the same difficulty:

For whereas Homer extends it so far as to the budding of the beard, Plato himself has remarked this as rare:

” Homer was fain to consent that Venus, so sweet and delicate a goddess as she was, should be wounded at the battle of Troy, thereby to ascribe courage and boldness to her qualities that cannot possibly be in those who are exempt from danger.

Repetition is everywhere troublesome, though it were in Homer;

I have both friends and kindred, not being, as Homer says, begotten of wood or of stone, no more than others, who might well present themselves before you with tears and mourning, and I have three desolate children with whom to move you to compassion;

Such there are who quote Plato and Homer, who never saw either of them;

their fertility is the same now that it was in the time of Homer and Plato.