"O monster! mix’d of insolence and fear,
Thou dog in forehead, but in heart a deer!
When wert thou known in ambush’d fights to dare,
Or nobly face the horrid front of war?
'Tis ours, the chance of fighting fields to try;
Thine to look on, and bid the valiant die:
So much 'tis safer through the camp to go,
And rob a subject, than despoil a foe.
Scourge of thy people, violent and base!
Sent in Jove’s anger on a slavish race;
Who, lost to sense of generous freedom past,
Are tamed to wrongs;–or this had been thy last!
Illiterate philistines! Can’t the “real” Homer get any love? Meanwhile the Homer Simpson quotes :smack: thread has gone on to 3 pages! Doh!
Patrocolos rated him (Meriones) for this:
My good man, why do you bandy words like this? You are wasting time. Taunts and jibes will not drive the Trojans away from the dead body. Many a man will fall before that! Words are potent in debate, deeds in war decide your fate. Then don’t go on piling up words, but fight!
And of course, the most violent line ever:
Idomeneus stabbed Erymas in the mouth. The point came out under the brain and broke the bones; his teeth were knocked out, and both his eyes filled with blood, which spurtedup through nostrils and mouth as he gaped. Then the cloud of death spread over him.
both from Rouse’s translation of the Illiad
That’s the problem. We are at the mercy of translators.
I can’t find an on-line text of Fagles’ Illiad–the best translation, IMO–and it takes too long to type.
“God-haunted Diomedes” is one of my favorite epithets.
From the Fagles translation of the Odyssey :
And I, my mind in turmoil, how I longed
to embrace my mother’s spirit, dead as she was!
Three time I rushed toward her, desparate to hold her,
three time she fluttered through my fingers, shifting away
like a shadow, dissolving like a dream, and each time
the grief cut to my heart, sharper, yes, and I,
I cried out to her, words winging into the darkness:
“Mother – why not wait for me? How I long to hold you! –
so even here, in the House of Death, we can fling
our loving arms around each other, take some joy
in the tears that numb the heart. Or is this just
some wraith that great Persephone sends my way
to make me ache with sorrow all the more?”
My noble mother answered me at once:
“My son, my son, the unluckiest man alive!
This is no deception sent by Queen Persephone,
this is just the way of mortals when we die.
Sinews no longer bind the flesh and bones together –
the fire in all its fury burns the body down to ashes
once life slips from the white bones, and the spirit,
rustling, flitters away . . . flown like a dream.”
(Book 11, lines 233 - 53)
Mmmmmmmm… Muuuusaká…
What? He never said that?