"She plies her course yet, nor her winged speed / The falcon could for pace exceed."
"Are those your lines, Mr. Mowett?"
"No, no, alas; they are Homer's. Lord, what a fellow he was! . . . I read him in a translation, a book a young lady gave me for a keepsake in Gibraltar, by a cove named Chapman, a very splendid cove . . . . Do you know him?"
"Not I," said Stephen. "Though I did look into Mr. Pope's version once, and Madame Dacier's. I hope your Mr. Chapman is better."
"Oh, it is magnificent--a great booming, sometimes, like a heavy sea, the Iliad being in fourteeners; and I am sure it is very like the Greek. I must show it to you. But then I dare say you have read him in the original."
"I had no choice. When I was a boy it was Homer and Virgil, Homer and Virgil entirely and many a stripe and many a tear between. But I came to love him for all that, and I quite agree with you--he is the very prince of poets. The Odyssey is a fine tale, sure, though I never could cordially like Ulysses: he lied excessively, it seems to me . . . . But the Iliad, of God love his soul, never was such a book as the Iliad!"
Mowett cried that the Doctor was in the right of it, and began to recite a particularly valued piece: soon losing himself, however. But Stephen scarcely heard; his mind glowed with the recollection and he exclaimed, "And the truly heroic sale, that makes us all look so mean and pallid; and the infinite art from the beginning to the noble end with Achilles and Priam talking quietly together in the night, both doomed and both known to be doomed--the noble end and its full close . . . . The book is full of death, but oh so living."
Patrick O'Brian
The Far Side of the World (Norton, 1984), pp. 126-127.
Study Guide for Homer's Iliad
Images of
the Trojan War
Online
information on the Trojan War
Age of Bronze
Links
Institute for Mediterranean Studies
(information on current Troy excavations)
Lewis Stiles's Study Questions for Homer's Iliad
Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad
John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
W.
B. Yeats's "Leda and the Swan"
Perseus Project (classics
resources)
Listen to Iliad 1 read in Greek by Stanley Lombardo.
Listen to the opening lines set to music by Ioannidis Nikolaos.
Discussion Questions
Books 1-8
Book 9
Books 10-12
Books 13-15
Books 16-17
Books 18-19
Books 20-21
Books 22-24