Iliad : Homer’s epic in 24 books. It tells the story of the quarrel of Achilles & Agamemnon over Briseis (q.v.) resulting in Achilles’s wrath & its consequences in the Trojan War.
... Gods and the World A bust of the epic poet Homer (2nd century BC) The Iliad Introduction The earliest examples of Greek literature are two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which most scholars today agree to attribute to one single great poet, Homer. Both epics were written down sometime in the 8th century BC. During this period... sightless man on stony Chios /All whose poems stand capital." From these lines and the fact that both the bards in the Iliad and the Odyssey are blind, it has been suggested that Homer was most probably blind himself. By the 6th century BC, the Greeks attributed both the Iliad and the Odyssey to Homer, and it is possible that the authoritative edition of the Odyssey existed in Athens at that... poetry inspired the poet to tell his tales, and successive generations of trained poets learned and taught a wealth of literary material orally. In keeping with the oral tradition. Homer created the Iliad and the Odyssey by taking building blocks of material from the poets who preceded him and .reshaping them to form the foundations of his artistic creation. These blocks included various myths about ...
... The Siege of Troy -06_Appendices.htm Appendices Summary of the Iliad At the opening of the poem, the Greeks have already besieged Troy for nine years in vain; they are despondent, homesick, and decimated with disease. They had been delayed at Aulis by sickness and a windless sea; and Agamemnon had embittered Clytemnestra, and prepared his own fate, by... Briseis to leave Achilles and take Chryseis' place in the royal tent. Achilles convokes a general assembly, and denounces Agamemnon with a wrath that provides the first word and recurring-theme of the Iliad. He vows that neither he nor his soldiers will any longer stir a hand to help the Greeks. (I-II) We pass in review the ships and tribes of the assembled force, and (III) see bluff Menelaus engaging... babe to be left on Mt. Ida. As fate would have it, the child was rescued and then raised by kind shepherds. He became a hearty and strong youth with a reputation for his good looks. After the Iliad Even after the death of Hector, the Trojans continued to fight sending out fresh heroes to take his place. One was the Amazon queen Penthesilea, who was killed by Achilles. It was said that when ...
... movement, moments of ever-changing fire. 3. The Iliad and the Odyssey: Great epic poems composed by Homer. The Iliad is the earliest written work of ancient Greece. It tells us the story of the siege of Troy. Scholars believe that Homer composed it as a young man in the middle of the 8th century BC. The Odyssey: It is believed that if the Iliad was a product of Homer's _____________ *... Our third text thus is taken out of the Iliad, one of the two famous epics written by Greece's greatest poet. Homer, and which, together with the Odyssey, has probably been the most read poem for the past three thousand years. Finally to conclude this monograph, we have included an excerpt from Sri Aurobindo's long poem Ilion, inspired by the Iliad and in which the Olympian gods are presented... 18 youth, the Odyssey arose out of his old age. It describes the ten-year long and difficult journey back to the home of Odysseus, one of the heroes in the Iliad. It is primarily a superb adventure story and, contrary to the Iliad which remains in the real world, it includes many elements of folklore (giants, monsters, sorceress; etc.). 4. Monotheism: Doctrine or belief that there is ...
... almost out-Homering Homer in the fullness of the delineation and the gorgeousness of the imagery. In attempting a continuation of the Iliad of Homer, Sri Aurobindo was taking no small risk, but it was also an irresistible challenge. George Steiner has described the Iliad as "the primer of tragic art", for the Western sense of the "tragic" has been woven out of its motifs and images: "the shortness of... of heroic life, the exposure of man to the murderousness and caprice of the inhuman, the fall of the City". 84 If the action of the Iliad is spread over eight days ending with the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles, llion covers the events of a single day, the last day of the doomed city of Troy. The Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna mentions how, after Hector's death, among those that... and she hates as well as loves the Phthian hero. Here, however, the outer struggle is obscurely - but none the less definitively - controlled by the cosmic purposings of the gods on Olympus. In the Iliad the "wrath" of Achilles with Agamemnon starts the action (or occasions the impasse that is the prelude to the action); in llion, the action comprises the "offer" of Achilles to Troy conveyed at dawn ...
... and the clash of mighty personalities and great powers form, incidentally and epically treated, the staple of Vyasa's epic. The poem was therefore, first and foremost, like the Iliad and Aeneid and even more than the Iliad and Aeneid, national — a poem in which the religious, social and personal temperament and ideals of the Aryan nation have found a high ex- pression and the institutions, actions... egoistic savage, and the other a cruel and cunning savage. I consider myself under an obligation to enter into Page 316 the spirit, significance, atmosphere of the Mahabharata, Iliad, Ramayana and identify myself with their time-spirit before I can feel what their heroes were in themselves apart from the details of their outer actions. As for the Avatarhood, I accept it for... Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville ____________________________ Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men —Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc The Crucifixion Nachiketas Socrates Sri Krishna in Brindavan ...
... husband Mynes, king of Lyrnessus, and carried her off. She was later taken from Achilles by Agamemnon. This act set off the quarrel between the two which forms the central "problem" of the Iliad. She was eventually restored to Achilles. Cassandra: The most beautiful daughter of Priam and Hecuba, king and queen of Troy. She was loved by Apollo but deceived him. In retaliation the god... eldest son of Priam and Hecuba and mightiest of the Trojan forces during the siege until his death. When Ilion opens he has already been slain by Achilles (in one of the best-known episodes of the Iliad). Hecuba: The chief wife of Priam and mother of nineteen of his fifty sons (many of them slain before the action of Ilion) as well as several daughters. Helen: Daughter of Zeus... messenger of Zeus and is often charged with delicate missions. In order to rapidly cross the celestial spaces, Hermes wears winged sandals. He sometimes adds wings to his hat to aid his flight. In Iliad, help-bringing Hermes is sent by Zeus to escort old Priam to Achilles without being seen by the Achaean sentinels. In the same fashion, he also helped the old king and his herald get away from the ...
... Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion -03_Homer and the Iliad.htm Homer and the Iliad A Brief Note I H omer is the name attached by the Greeks of ancient times themselves to the two great epic poems, Iliad and Odyssey. Unfortunately, not much is known of him, but there is no doubt that there was indeed an epic poet called Homer... in marble. In both the Iliad and Odyssey, one feels uplifted upon the earth that belongs to a higher plane of a greater dynamic of life, and so long as we remain there, we have a greater vision in a more lustrous air and we feel ourselves raised to a semi-divine stature. Homer may be regarded as one of the most influential poets in world history, since the Iliad and Odyssey provided... of view of essential force and beauty, Homer and Shakespeare stand above all the rest, although Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharta is greater in his range than Homer in the Page 11 Iliad. Similarly, Valmiki has a greater range than Homer in Odyssey. Both Vyasa and Valmiki, in their strength and in their achievement in regard to the largeness of the field are greater than the whole ...
... mind and temperament of the poet": 28 he is moved to reveal and idealise and thus, in a broad sense, to interpret and not merely present. "When we read the Iliad o r the Odyssey , we are not really upon this earth, but on the earth lifted into some plane of a greater dynamis of life, and so long as we remain there we... 22 the clash of great and strong spirits with the gods leaning down to participate in their struggle which makes the greatness of the Iliad and not merely the action and stir of battle." 30 Yet again: "Homer with all his epic vigour of outward presentation does not show us the heroes and... The artificial and conventional nature of the style in this age can at once be seen by taking any lines from Homer and putting them before Pope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here are two addressed by Ulysses in surprise to Elpenor who, unknown to his leader, had fallen overboard to his death in the sea and afterwards ...
... were sick and prescribing for them various courses of treatment or diet, as we learn from his letters. He was also devoted by nature to all kinds of learning and was a lover of books. He regarded the Iliad 2 as a handbook of the art of w and took with him on his campaigns a text annotated 3 I Aristotle, which became known as "the casket copy", and which he always kept under his pillow together with... deals with first principles esp. of being and knowing. 2. the philosophical study of the nature of reality, concerned with such questions as the existence of God, the external world, etc. 2 The Iliad is an epic poem on the Trojan War traditionally attributed the ancient Greek poet Homer. 3 To annotate: to supply (a written work, such as an ancient text) with critical or explanatory notes. ... northwestern Anatolia that holds an enduring place in both literature and archaeology. The legend of the Trojan War is the most notable theme from ancient Greek literature and forms the basis of Homer's Iliad. Ancient Troy commanded a strategic point at the southern entrance to the Dardanelles (Hellespont). 3 For the Greeks, Athena is the goddess of war, handicrafts and practical reason. She is also ...
... that the Iliad of Homer is really a pastiche or clever rifacimento of old ballads put together in the time of Pisistratus. This truly barbarous imagination with its rude ignorance of the psychological bases of all great poetry has now fallen into some discredit; it has been replaced by a more plausible attempt to discover a nucleus in the poem, an Achilleid, out of which the larger Iliad has grown... States & the clash of mighty personalities and great powers form, incidentally & epically treated, the staple of Vyasa's epic. The poem was therefore, first & foremost, like the Iliad and Aeneid and even more than the Iliad and Aeneid, national—a poem in which the religious, social and personal temperament and ideals of the Aryan nation have found a high expression and its institutions, actions, heroes... hopelessly tangled than any that precede them except the first. It is here & here only that the keenest eye becomes confused & the most confident explorer begins to lose heart & self-reliance. But the Iliad is all battles and it therefore follows in the European mind that the original Mahabharata must have been all battles. Another method is that of ingenious, if forced argument from stray slokas of the ...
... base the quality of the ancient hexameter cannot be reproduced. No doubt, that quality is an inner one; the very spirit of the hexameter must be caught, the poet's blood must have the surge of the Iliad and the broad even stream of the Aeneid before he can play Homer and Virgil in English, Yet a proper sense of the outer form is also needed for the inner spirit to find natural and constant embodiment... its potentialities. Even in the hands of a poet finer than Kingsley, Clough or Longfellow, the movement lacks ease and power except for a few almost accidental steps. Here is a translation from the Iliad by George Meredith: Now, as when fire voracious catches the undipped woodland, This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind and the scrubwood Stretches uptorn,... 44 dactylic tyranny of the accentual base would stop this falsification. Unstressed longs in clear metrical power are needed by the English hexameter to achieve a rhythmic kinship to the Iliad and the Aeneid; unusual stress-combinations are needed by it to acquire a pliancy in keeping with all other metrical patterns in English. To give these two factors of foot-construction a many-shaded ...
... except the 380 lines which had appeared in 1942. Like Homer's Iliad, Sri Aurobindo's Ilion is also an incomplete work. Iliad is spread over eight days, ending with the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles. Sri Aurobindo's Ilion covers the events of a single day, the last day of the doomed city of Troy. In Homer's Iliad, the action begins with the wrath of Achilles with Agamemnon. In... Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion -04_Sri Aurobindo and Ilion.htm Sri Aurobindo and Ilion I S ri Aurobindo was born on the 15th August 1872 at Calcutta. At an early age of seven, he was taken along with his elder brothers to England for education, since his father wanted him to have no Indian influence in the shaping of his outlook and... men and environment to accept its domination. He was, indeed, in an earlier phase aggressive and brutal, but his soul-power pushed him to higher grades of a noble and visionary hero. Already in the Iliad of Homer, the way in Page 38 Athena Page 39 which he responds to Priam's request to deliver Hector's dead body manifests a noble salute of a hero to a hero and a deeper ...
... 20th-century sensibility. Homer possessed of a vision as wide as the world of his day, a sympathy as deep as the heart itself and a vast interpretative sense created, like a demiurge, in his Iliad and Odyssey, a world of his own: a whole human world of terror and pity and passion; the battlefield's blood-thirstiness, the tenderness of the heart, and the all-ruling majesty of calm, — a human... Sri Aurobindo put Homer along with Valmiki and Shakespeare in the first row of the world's supreme poets. One thing, however, is strikingly similar in both the epics. Homer's Iliad is full "of images drawn from fire, the armies clash 'even as destroying fire that falls upon a limitless forest;' and the men 'fight together, a body of burning fire.' The whole poem is shot through... to supematuralism which finds its sublimest expression in his Divina Commedia. A great poem, it strangely unifies romance, epic, drama, lyric; it grows on a scale that is grander even than the Iliad, in that it is based, philosophically, on the Scholastic system of St. Thomas Aquinas, ethically on the Neo-Platonic system, and spatially on an entire cosmos in which higher and lower worlds are ...
... of modernist verse. Together with a certain explosiveness and want of control, it makes Chapman's translation of the Iliad not only inadequate Homer but even inadequate first-class inspiration of a non-Homeric species. I expect James Lloyd's The Poetry and Philosophy of the Iliad, which my catalogue announces as soon-to-be-published, will distinguish perfectly balanced strength from jerky boldness... world. What can be called the philosophy of the Iliad, the Homeric position vis-a-vis broad basic issues, is not anything particular we can put our finger on in the poem: it is a significant aroma sent forth by the whole, a suggestive atmosphere which we feel when the poem is absorbed in toto. When I try to render explicit what is implicit in the Iliad, I find three main elements interplaying ...
... the 'authentic' epics, the so-called communal or folk epics, the epics of tradition, on the one hand, and the more deliberate compositions, on the other, of a later day. Among the former are the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Song of Roland, Beowulf and the Asiatic Gilgamesh; and among the latter, the Aeneid, the Divina Commedia (if it could be called an epic), Camoens' Os Lusiadas, Paradise... epic The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel 8 and Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. It cannot be the truth that the days of the epic are over. An epic of our time cannot be exactly modelled on an Iliad or a Mahabharata; a modern epic must not be a mimicry of a great ancient epic. The 'race' may be essentially the same, but the 'milieu'—especially the climate of thought—must have changed a good... (he says), we cannot tell; therefore we should more expressly long to understand the union of our nature with God's, that is, the Incarnation." 15 The Commedia, superficially, is as unlike the Iliad as cheese is unlike chalk; but what it loses in one way it gains in another; there is less of the blaze of action and assertion and more of the twilight revelation of inner striving and struggle ...
... Examples from Classical and Mediaeval Writers Would you please tell me where in Homer the "descent of Apollo" occurs? 1 It is in the first fifty or a hundred lines of the first book of the Iliad. 2 I don't suppose Chapman or Pope have rendered it adequately. Of course not—nobody could translate that—they have surely made a mess of it. Homer's passage translated into English would... See page 186 ―Ed. × The passage begins with line 44 of the first book of the Iliad: bē de kat' Oulumpoio karēnōn chōomenos kēr.— Ed. × This sentence was incorporated in the composite ...
... between objects or situations or persons, launches again and again on long compa-risons which are themselves complete pictures — small dramatic scenes inset into the main visual reconstruction: the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's... contorted which were very much in vogue in Shakespeare's day and which Shakespeare himself often dange-rously skirted — things like that outrageous distortion of Homer by Chapman in his translation of the Iliad: And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know, Page 184 When sacred Troy shall shed her towers for tears of over-throw. The second line is what is called a conceit ...
... glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still remain mighty names in the roll of poetry. Even when the verse is not a sober bridge between the glories of dramatic... A Dream of Surreal Science 1 One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, At the Mermaid, capture immortality; A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink Composed the Iliad A thyroid, meditating almost nude Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light And, rising from its mighty solitude, Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold path all right. A brain ...
... Olympias claimed descent from Achilles. Therefore the Iliad had a special fascination for Alexander; when he crossed the Hellespont he was, in his interpretation, retracing the steps of Achilles; when he conquered Hither Asia he was completing the work that his ancestor had begun at Troy. Through all his campaigns he carried with him a copy of the Iliad annotated by Aristotle; often he placed it under his ...
... when he sacked her town and killed her husband. She was later taken from Achilles by his king Agamemnon. This act set off the quarrel between the two which forms the central unresolved problem in the Iliad. Cassandra: the most beautiful daughter of Priam and Hecuba;She was loved by Apollo, but deceived him. In retaliation he cursed her with the gift of prophecy, with the hitch that her prophecies... from a legendary hero, Ilus, who founded their city. Myths tell us that two gods helped to fortify the city walls, making it a significant stronghold in the region. The Trojans as we meet them in the Iliad are a highly civilized people ruled by a wise and benevolent king. Xanthus: the divine name given to a river of the Troad which was named Scamander by mortals. ...
... that the Iliad of Homer is really a pastiche or clever rifacimento of old ballads put together in the time of Pisistratus. 1 This truly barbarous imagination with its rude ignorance of the psychological bases of all great poetry has now fallen into some discredit; it has been replaced by a more plausible attempt to discover a nucleus in the poem, an Achilleid, out of which the larger Iliad has grown... hopelessly tangled than any that precede them except the first. It is here & here only that the keenest eye becomes confused & the most confident explorer begins to lose heart & self-reliance. But the Iliad is all battles and it therefore follows in the European mind that the original Mahabharata must have been all battles. Another method is Page 338 that of ingenious, if forced argument from ...
... Zeus. But this was by no means the beginning of Greek athletics. We know from Homer, the author of the two famous epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, that the events of the Games had been practised in the Greek world many centuries before the Trojan War. In the Iliad, right in the middle of that war, the great hero "swift-footed Achilles" organises "funeral" games in honour of his dear friend Patroclus... proper tribute to his friend. Athletics were thought the best way of honouring the gods and those striving to surpass them, the "heroes". Let us turn back to Homer for a moment. The poet of the Iliad had what some misguided people today think the most necessary qualification for the artist: he was class-conscious. He writes only of kings and princes; the ordinary soldier plays no part in the poem ...
... metaphor familiar. If we read the Iliad in this year of grace 1945, with nearly three thousand years in-between crammed with poetic literature, we shall not find many new metaphors in it - nor, I suspect, did the ancient Greeks themselves, for all the similes were borrowed from familiar experience and were current in the unrecorded minstrelsy out of which the Iliad rose like a culminating blossom ...
... glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still remain mighty names in the roll of poetry. Even when the verse is not a sober bridge between the glories of dramatic... DREAM OF SURREAL SCIENCE One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink At the Mermaid, capture immortality; A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. ____________ 1 Mr. Lal, for some reason, has a new name: One Dreamed and Saw. Page 150 A thyroid, meditating almost nude Under the Bo-tree ...
... Observe what Milton has said. One thing is that he compares himself with the nightingale. This is perhaps the most unexpected comparison an epic poet could have made. We hardly conceive of Homer's Iliad or Vyasa's Mah ā bh ā rata or Dante's Divina Commedia as a nightingale's song. Least of all would we normally associate this song with Paradise Lost. The nightingale reminds us of Catullus... presence and this deployment of scholarship: they are of the very essence of its poetry. The other epic poets are more or less submerged in their subjects. So little of Homer the man is in the Iliad that scholars have even hatched the silly theory that Homer is the name of half a dozen different hands that have pooled their works - silly because one Homer is already a mighty freak difficult ...
... universe-existence, inexpressible indeed, but still here expressed. It is as if, in reading a translation of the Ramayan or Homer's Iliad, we were to look at the unapproachable something no translator can seize and say "This is not the Ramayan", "This is not the Iliad" and yet, looking at the comparative adequacy of the expressions which do succeed in catching something of the original spirit and intention ...
... successful than most...." Now, to have a true measure of the claimed success we have only to take the reviewer's quotation of Lattimore's rendering of the first line of Homer's famous passage in the Iliad about the descent of Apollo to avenge the Greeks' insult to his high-priest Chryses: Be de kat' oulumpoio karenon choömenos ker. Lattimore writes: And strode down along the pinnacles... the lay—sing, Zeus-born goddess for us too! It would seem that today the most promising voice is of an American disciple of Sri Aurobindo: Jesse Roarke. He has a translation of the entire Iliad waiting for an imaginative publisher. 1 Ibid., p. 1 Page 314 Some passages have seen the light in the pages of Mother India. 1 Quite a few of their quantitative units ...
... subjecting it to any other change he casts it in lines of beauty and in divine proportions; he deals with it as Phidias dealt with the human form when he wished to create a god in marble. When we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are not really upon this earth, but on the earth lifted into some plane of a greater dynamis of life, and so long as we remain there we have a greater vision in a more lustrous... hexameters of a genuine inspiration and with something of the same sound-spirit we shall miss the final touch of his oceanic verse. One of his most famous lines comes at almost the beginning of the Iliad. Agamemnon has captured Chryseis, the daughter of the high-priest of Apollo. The high-priest approaches him and pleads for the return of his daughter. Agamemnon insolently refuses to hand her over ...
... Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion -02_Preface.htm Illumination, Heroism and Harmony Preface The task of preparing teaching-learning material for value-oriented education is enormous. There is, first, the idea that value-oriented education should be exploratory rather than prescriptive, and that the teaching learning material should... and rise to a high pitch of accomplishment. He was, indeed, in an earlier phase aggressive and brutal, but his soul-power pushed him to higher grades of a noble and visionary hero. Already in the Iliad of Homer, the way in which he responds to Priam's request to deliver Hector's dead body manifests a noble salute of a hero to a hero and a deeper perception and urge for harmomzation, In Ilion, Sri ...
... e. "He ranked Valmiki above Vyas. He regarded the former as the greatest epic poet in the world. He once said: 'I was captivated by the poetic genius of Dante, and immensely enjoyed Homer's Iliad - they are incomparable in European literature. But in the quality of his poetry, Valmiki stands supreme. There is no epic in the world that can compare with the Ramayana of Valmiki 64 .... ... of all English poets from Chaucer to Swinburne were also there. Countless English novels were stacked in his book-cases, littered in the comers of his rooms, and stuffed in his steel trunks. The Iliad of Homer, the Divine Comedy of Dante, our Ramayana, Mahabharata, Kalidasa were also among those books. He was very fond of Russian literature... "After learning Bengali fairly well, Aurobindo ...
... Science: One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink At the Mermaid, capture immortality; A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. A thyroid, meditating almost nude Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light And, rising from its mighty solitude, Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold... of Dawn, responding, giving the categorical promise: "Lo, I come, and behind me Knowledge descends..." 119 But Ilion, although left incomplete, is superb in its own way. Homer's Iliad begins with the tenth year of the siege of Troy and concludes with the death and funeral rites of Hector. The subsequent history of the Trojan War may be pieced together from references in other poems ...
... itself in acts of often insane tyranny. This was especially the case with Alexander; but Napoleon was not free from the same taint. Alexander, we know, strove consciously to mould his life into an Iliad; Napoleon regarded his as a Titanic epic and when facts would not fit in ideally with his conception of himself as its great protagonist, he would alter & falsify them with as little scruple as a dramatist ...
... capable in Occidental history, but which in ancient India were common and usual. Mr. Gladstone was considered to be the possessor of an astonishing memory because he could repeat the whole of Homer's Iliad, beginning from any passage suggested to him and flowing on as long as required; but to a Brahmin of the old times this would have been a proof of a capacity neither unusual nor astonishing, but rather ...
... Surreal Science Know more > One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink At the Mermaid, capture immortality; A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. A thyroid, meditating almost nude Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light And, rising from its mighty solitude, Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all right. A ...
... picturesque surrounding circumstance, and it is the clash of great and strong spirits with the gods leaning Page 243 down to participate in their struggle which makes the greatness of the Iliad and not merely the action and stir of battle. The outward form of Shakespeare's work is a surge of emotion and passion and thought and act and event arising out of character at ferment in the yeast ...
... their essential poetic force and beauty—not of the scope of their work as a whole, for there are poets greater in their range. The Mahabharata is from that point of view a far greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey, and either spreads its strength and its achievement over a larger field than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare; both are built on an almost cosmic vastness of plan ...
... "only a combination of physiological reactions or a complex of the changes of grey brain-matter or a flaming marvel of electrical discharges". These examples are: "Plato's theory of ideas or Homer's Iliad or the cosmic consciousness of the Yogin." 21 Page 18 Notes and References 1."Lammergeyer", Altar and Flame : Poems by Amal Kiran (Aspiration, Charlottesville, Virginia ...
... her towers for tears of overthrow. Even when a verse is free from such startling falsities, there is often a jerkiness flawing it. An exceedingly fine phrase is another rendering from the Iliad: When the unmeasured firmament bursts to disclose her light. But with a most sensitive ear Sri Aurobindo 10 has commented that here is a rhythm which does not mate with the idea and ...
... By this time, the thirties, we know only one attempt to make mightily; but Hardy's Dynasts is a sprawling greatness. Though its plan has behind it an intention more intricate and extensive than the Iliad, it lacks the organic control the latter, for all "our vagueness about its single authorship, exhibits so lucidly to the mind, and it suffers also by an unsteady poetic fire in the various parts. If ...
... two kinds—those that deal with directly spiritual experiences and an unfinished epic of about five thousand lines, entitled Ilion, that is based on Page 107 Homer's theme in the Iliad. Only some four hundred and odd lines of this fragment were subjected to thorough revision by Sri Aurobindo, but the whole of it is memorable both as poetry and as technique. And even if this were ...
... self-sufficing line — a complete sentence in iambic pentameter consisting of eight words: It was the hour before the Gods awake. This line is the shortest start of any epic. The Iliad has a dactylic line starting the theme with a greater number of syllables proper to the quantitative hexameter — a number which Pope is obliged to match by a full heroic couplet: Achilles' ...
... a superiority that does not add to the purely poetical quality: You have said somewhere that, in spite of the Mahabharata and Ramayana being greater, wider and deeper creations than the Iliad and Shakespeare's work, Vyasa and Valmiki, though not inferior, are not superior poets. Doesn't this amount to saying that neither the plane nor the scope nor the theme of a poetical creation ...
... We may also remember that to have a sustained quality does not necessarily render a work superior to another which has ups and downs. Horace's dictum, "Even Homer sometimes nods", refers to the Iliad, but surely the epos of Achilles's wrath is greater than that of Odysseus's wanderings. There is a dazzling fire, there is a dizzying flight in the former that reveal more and reach farther than ...
... a complete sentence in iambic pentameter consisting of eight words: It was the hour before the Gods awake. [p.1] Page 257 This line is the shortest start of any epic. The Iliad has a dactylic line starting the theme with a greater number of syllables proper to the quantitative hexameter - a number which Pope is obliged to match by a full heroic couplet: Achilles' wrath ...
... age". Hot racial elements and nascent cultural trends are boldly brought out 1 A.B. Purani, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: An Approach and a Study, p. 25. in it. While in the Iliad we have a great historic fight recounted in simple style, there is no story in Dante's Divina Commedia in that sense. Then, it comes out that the story need not be a historical fact; only it must ...
... Civilization: Egypt and Chaldea, London, 1897; S. Reinach, Orpheus: A History of Religions, New York,1909 and 1930; Lynn Thorndike, Short History of Civilization, New York, 1926. 2 Homer, Iliad, translation by W. C. Bryant, Boston, I898' Homer, Odyssey, text and translation by A. T. Murray, Loeb Library. 3 Murray, G., Five stages of Greek Religion, Oxford, I930. 4 Harrison ...
... and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati 's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled ...
... Sri Krishna in Brindavan Nala and Damayanti Raghuvamsham of Kalidasa Svapna Vasavadattam The Siege of Troy Gods & the World Homer and the Iliad -Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Socrates Alexander the Great The Crucifixion Joan of Arc Catherine the Great Uniting Men — Jean Monnet Arguments ...
... of Human Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled by Kireet Joshi On ...
... published in 1957, seven years after Sri Aurobindo’s passing. The opening of the first hook alone had been revised by him and published in his Collected Poems and Plays in 1942. Inspired of Homer’s Iliad, Ilion covers the events Page 61 of one day, the day when the fate of Troy was sealed. It starts at dawn with Talthybius, herald of Argos, arriving at Troy with a proposition of truce ...
... that manhood in innumerable warriors who could clear the ground for the manifestation of divinity that is always concealed in the highest peaks of manhood. Valmiki's Ramayana is comparable to Homer's Iliad and Vyasa's Mahabharata; all the three are great epics and all the three stand out as great hymns of heroism; each has its own excellence and Page 13 even superiority over the others, but ...
... lines) contains a great number of later interpolations. Dayananda Saraswati remarked that it resembles a camel to whose burden people kept adding.* Thus the epic is seven-fold greater in bulk than the Iliad and Odyssey taken together. Vyasa is said to have taught the poem to one of his pupils, Vaishampayana. Vaishampayana, in his turn, recited the epic to Janamejaya, grand-son of Abhimanyu. It ...
... (1) A Dream of Surreal Science One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink At the Mermaid, capture immortality; A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. A thyroid, meditating almost nude Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light And, rising from its mighty solitude, Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all right ...
... Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Taittiriya Upanishad Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama ...
... fine ... A magnificent poem". [Sri Aurobindo put brackets around "Quite awfully fine".] This is too jocular a form for a solemn "remark". The rest by itself sounds as if you had written the Iliad. Better say more modestly "An extremely fine poem". By the way, I know that Mother's programme is too crammed; still, I was wondering if I could be occasionally or rarely put in edgeways as one ...
... The Siege of Troy -05_Achilles and Priam.htm Zeus (Bronze statue 470 460 BC) Achilles and Priam This passage is the final chapter of Homer's Iliad. It describes the events that followed upon Prince Hector's defeat by Achilles and how the gods intervened to soften Achilles heart so that he would give the vanquished prince the honor and respect he ...
... human and divine that purify the lower nature and bring out the latent noble and godlike possibilities. The struggles between the Greeks and the Trojans revolve around issues of power and honor. The Iliad shows us the conflict between mighty human spirits, and how the Gods intervene in such conflicts to workout a Divine Will. Homer casts the life of Man in divine proportions. This is the power which ...
... VI The Odysseus Theme In a perceptive essay on 'The Odyssey and the Western World', George de E Lord has tried to delineate Odysseus as a middle term between the Achilles of the Iliad and the Aeneas of Virgil's poem. Between Hamlet, father, the old-world heroic hero who smote the sledded Polacks on the ice, and Horatio the self-poised humanist who is not passion's slave, Shakespeare ...
... , 103 Gundari, 258 Gupta, Robi, 192 HAMLET, 72 Heruka, 268 Himalaya , 237, 281n. Hiranyagarbha, 143, 256 Hugo, Victor, 191 ILIAD, 22 India , 10-12, 24-5, 57, 112, 189, 254 Indra, 134, 138, 144,203,272 JALANDHRIPADA, 280 Janaka, 49, 51 Jayadeva, 149 –Gita Govinda ...
... poems. A poet need not have intellectual ideas to be great. Homer has no intellectual ideas. There are only one or two lines that contain a great thought in the first five or six books, Otherwise the Iliad is all war and action and movement. And you can't say that Homer is not a great poet. If you do, you'll have to ignore many poets of the past. When Nishikanto started writing, I said his poems were ...
... Him that I had not much time to write poems - only one and a half hours each day. He replied: Luckyman! Ample time, sir, ample time, both to realise the Brahman and to write another Iliad or Nirodiad. (Laughter) Good Lord! What can one write in 1 or l l /2 hours? If I could only get that [much] time for immortal productions every day! Why, in another ...
... OF SURREAL SCIENCE One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink At the Mermaid, capture immortality; A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. A thyroid, meditating almost nude Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light And, rising from its mighty solitude, Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold ...
... pointedly satirical terms: One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink At the Mermaid, capture immortality; A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. A thyroid, meditating almost nude Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light And, rising from its mighty solitude, Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all ...
... cold denial. From her "searching gaze mysticism shrank out-mystified." 1 One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet . . . A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. A thyroid, meditating almost nude Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light . . . A brain by a disordered stomach driven Thundered through Europe, conquered, ...
... style of criticism would be if an Indian critic who had read European literature only in bad or ineffective Indian translations, were to pass it under a hostile and disparaging review, dismiss the Iliad as a crude and empty semi-savage and primitive epos, Dante's great work as the nightmare of a cruel and superstitious religious fantasy, Shakespeare as a drunken barbarian of considerable genius with ...
... sometime before November 1912. He was working on Ilion at this time, but these lines do not seem to belong to that poem. Neither do they appear to be a translation of lines from the Iliad , the Odyssey or any other classical text. Sole in the meadows of Thebes . No title in the manuscript. 1913.Written on the same manuscript page as the following poem, at around ...
... halts over [ideas and] having mastered an idea works round it in a circle; the other [masters ideas] unerringly [........] but stumbles among facts and applications. The mind of the European is an Iliad or an Odyssey, fighting rudely but heroically forward, or, full of a rich curiosity, wandering as an accurate and vigorous observer in landlocked seas of thought; the mind of the Asiatic is a Ramayan ...
... The story is supposed to have taken place in what has been termed the 'heroic age' in which hot racial elements and nascent cultural trends are brought out boldly and simply. While in the Iliad, Odyssey and in the Niebelungenlied, the subject matter concerns a great fight which has stamped itself indelibly on the memory of the race, in Dante's The Divine Comedy there is no story at ...
... confusion to which we are now subject. One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink At the Mermaid, capture immortality; A committee of hormones on the Aegean’s brink Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. A thyroid, meditating almost nude Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light And, rising from its mighty solitude, Spoke of the Wheel and the eightfold Path all right … ...
... the ancient Indian epos Mahabharata , is one of the great creations of the human spirit, if not the greatest. Indeed, when compared with the most brilliant passages of the Gilgamesh epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey , the works of the Greek tragedians, Dante’s Divina Commedia or the best of Shakespeare, the Gita soars above them all because of its philosophical and spiritual depth, its representative ...
... setting become one furious egoistic savage and the other a cruel and cunning the savage. I consider myself under an obligation to enter into the spirit, significance, atmosphere of the Mahabharata, Iliad, a and identify myself with their time-spirit before I Page 89 can feel what their heroes were in themselves apart from the details of their outer actions. As for the Avatarhood ...
... I said there were no greater poets than Homer and Shakespeare, I was thinking of their essential poetic force and beauty—not of their work as a whole. The Mahabharata is a greater creation than the Iliad, the Ramayana than the Odyssey, and either reigns over a larger field than the whole dramatic world of Shakespeare—both are built on an almost cosmic greatness of plan and take all human life (the ...
... We may also remember that to have a sustained quality does not necessarily render a work superior to another which has ups and downs. Horace's dictum, "Even Homer sometimes nods", refers to the Iliad , but surely the epos of Achilles's wrath is greater than that of Odysseus's wanderings. There is a dazzling fire, there is a dizzying flight in the former that reveal more and reach farther than ...
... fashioning clever patterns of remote sound. His hexameters too are not bare technique: they are vital, they are a body of novel construction found at length in a modem tongue to match that of the Iliad and the Aeneid for a new searching of human hearts and mortal fortunes. To deal with a Greek theme is not to be antiquated or obsolete. Much depends on the inner substance of the theme. When we open ...
... subjecting it to any other change he casts it in lines of beauty and in divine proportions; he deals with it as Phidias dealt with the human form when he wished to create a god in marble. When we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are not really upon this earth, but on the earth lifted into some plane of a greater dynamis of life, and so long as we remain there we have a greater vision in a more lustrous air ...
... setting become, one a furious egoistic savage, and the other a cruel and cunning savage. I consider myself under an obligation to enter into the spirit, significance, atmosphere of the Mahabharata, Iliad, Ramayana and identify myself with their time-spirit before I can feel what their heroes were in themselves apart from the details of their outer action. As for the Avatarhood, I accept it for Rama ...
... into or amount to or by itself constitute in result a conscious operation, a perception, emotion, thought-concept, or prove that love is a chemical product or that Plato's theory of ideas or Homer's Iliad or the cosmic consciousness of the Yogin was only a combination of physiological reactions or a complex of the changes of grey brain matter or a flaming marvel of electrical discharges. It is not only ...
... between objects or situations or persons, launches again and again on long comparisons which are complete pictures in their own right—small dramatic scenes inset into the main visual reconstruction: the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's ...
... a present vision. It lacks what David Jones calls 'nowness'. Would Virgil have been impressed, or Ovid (not to speak of Homer) by some clever schoolboy or graduate's imitation of the Aeneid or the Iliad? There is an astonishing virtuosity (of course Aurobindo would have carried off the prize, whether from Eton or from Cambridge or Oxford) but would any true poet have given his time and energy to such ...
... seeks to interpret. A subtilisation and elevation of the sheer physical on its own level, rather than a sweeping condensation of the pure spiritual without any loss, is the genius animating the Iliad and the Odyssey. The typical mark of the passages quoted from Sri Aurobindo is the general overhead atmosphere breathing one or another level beyond the mind, either distinctly or in c ...
... glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still Page 69 remain mighty names in the roll of poetry. Even when the verse is not a sober bridge between ...
... of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville __________________________________________ Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander theGreat Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men -Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc The Crucifixion Nachiketas Socrates Sri Krishna in Brindavan ...
... voice". 21 bastard children: the heroes and demigods of mythology. 22 son of Thetis: Achilles. The passage, which Socrates partly paraphrases and partly quotes, is Iliad XViii. 94-106. 23 Potidaea in Chalcidice revolted from Athens in 432 and was reduced two years later. In the preliminary fighting Socrates saved the life of Alcibiades, as the latter ...
... Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Gods and the World joan of Arc The Crucifixion Other titles published by SAIIER and Shubhra Ketu Foundation The Aim of Life ...
... Socrates' "warning voice". bastard children: the heroes and demigods of mythology. son of Thetis: Achilles. The passage which Socrates partly paraphrases and partly quotes is Iliad XViii. 94-106. Potidaea in Chalcidice revolted from Athens in 432 and was reduced two years later. In the preliminary fighting Socrates saved the life of Alcibiades, as the latter relates ...
... 129 Other titles in the Illumination, Heroism and Harmony Series Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men —Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc Page 130 ...
... International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men — Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc The Crucifixion Nachiketas Socrates Sri Krishna in Brindavan ...
... Education by Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The Siege of Troy Alexander the Great Homer and the Iliad — Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Uniting Men — Jean Monnet Gods and the World Joan of Arc The Crucifixion Nachiketas Socrates Sri Krishna in Brindavan ...
... Gods and the World Poscidon the brother of Zeus and the Lord of the seas, was also the Master of Horses The Gods at War Excerpt from the Iliad by Homer Not on the tramp of the multitudes, not on the cry of the legions Founds the strong man his strength but the god he carries within him. Extract from Talthybius' discourse to ...
... Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion ...
... of Human Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled by Kireet Joshi ...
... Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati’s Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled by Kireet Joshi ...
... •Nachiketas •Taittiriya Upanishad •Sri Rama •Sri Krishna in Vrindavan •Nala and Damayanti •Episodes from Raghuvamsham of Kalidasa •The Siege of Troy •Homer and the Iliad-Sri Aurobindo and Ilion •Gods and the World •Socrates •Crucifixion •Alexander the Great •Joan of Arc •Catherine the Great •Uniting Men-Jean Monnet •Arguments ...
... •Nachiketas •Taittiriya Upanishad •Sri Rama •Sri Krishna in Vrindavan •Nala and Damayanti •Episodes from Raghuvamsham of Kalidasa •The Siege of Troy •Homer and the Iliad-Sri Aurobindo and Ilion •Gods and the World •Socrates •Crucifixion •Alexander the Great m •Joan of Arc •Catherine the Great •Uniting Men-Jean Monnet ...
... to me exclusively. So only 9.30-11 is the solid time. What can one write in one or one and a half hours? Lucky man! Ample time, sir, ample time, both to realise the Brahman and to write another Iliad—or Nirodiad. Good Lord! what can one write in 1 or 1½ hours? If I could only get that time for immortal productions every day! Why in another three years Savitri and Ilion and I don't know how much ...
... Page 133. Other titles in the Illumination and Harmony series Parvati's Tapasya Nala and Damayanti The siege Of Troy Alexander the great Homer and the Iliad- Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Joan of Arc The crucifixion Gods and the World Printed at Auroville Press Auroville 2005 ...
... of Human Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati’s Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled by Kireet Joshi On M ...
... Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men - Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad - Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Compiled by ...
... Human Body Gods and the World Crucifixion Uniting Men Jean Monnet Joan of Arc Nala and Damayanti Alexander the Great Siege of Troy Homer and the Iliad Sri Aurobindo and Ilion Catherine the Great Parvati's Tapasya Sri Krishna in Vrindavan Socrates Nachiketas Sri Rama Philosophy of Supermind and Contemporary ...
... hexameter that Homer has composed his wonderful epics with their sublime poetry. I do not wish to plague you with too many quotations from the original Greek, but let me recite the opening line of Homer's Iliad: Mênin a/iede, the/a, Pê/lê/iadêo Achi/lêos Many of you are no doubt acquainted with its rendering in English: Sing heavenly Muse, the wrath of Achilles, Peleus' son. Perhaps ...
... history, but which in ancient India were common and usual. Mr. Gladstone was considered to be the possessor of an astonishing memory because he could repeat Page 88 the whole of Homer's Iliad, beginning from any passage suggested to him and flowing' on as long as required; but to a Brahmin of the old times this would have been a proof of a capacity neither unusual nor astonishing, but rather ...
... people. The story is supposed to have taken place in what has been termed the 'heroic age' in which hot racial elements and nascent cultural trends are brought out boldly and simply. While in the 'Iliad', Odyssey and in the Niebelungenlied, the subject matter concerns a great fight which has stamped itself indelibly on the memory of the race, in Dante's Divine Comedy there is no story at all in that ...
... Sri Aurobindo was an Indian who mastered classical Greek and so completely entered into the spirit of Homer's poetry that he attempted, as we saw in the previous chapter, a 'sequel' to the Iliad in English hexameters. Nikos Kazantzakis was a Cretan Greek who became a European and a man of the world and tried to cram into his life and work divers realms and modes of experience. He knew (like ...
... 'THE BOOK OF DEATH' I The Two Missing Cantos In the two opening cantos of Savitri, the action of the epic begins, as in Western epics like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, at a critical point even the most critical; the action plunges in medias res, into the middle of things: it is the dawn of the day when Satyavan is fated to die according to ...
... "Of man's first disobedience", the marvellous opening phrase of his epic, at once projects the theme of Paradise Lost, so does the reference to the "wrath of Achilles" at the very beginning of Iliad. In Savitri, too, the opening line carries Page 359 in itself, as a seed does the tree, the whole universe of this epic that is both a legend and a symbol. 'The hour' in ...
... Lustre of Paradise, light of the earth-ways marry and mingle. 75 The Ilion is an epic after the manner of Homer, continuing the story of the siege of Troy from the point where The Iliad ends; but of the 5,000 lines pf the epic that Sri Aurobindo left behind him, only the first 381 lines were cast in the final form and published in his lifetime. The quality of the hexameter, as ...
... champclos the perennial strangeness, the adventurousness, and the sinuous forward movement of the inner life." 134 It is not true in all cases that an Odyssey is better than an Iliad, a Pilgrim's Progress better than a Holy War. Besides, as Dr E.M.W. Tillyard points out, by way of retort, "the pilgrimage subject encourages diffuseness and endless episodes, whereas the martial ...
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