If they continued to sing like their great predecessor of romantic themes, they were drawn as by a kind of magnetic attraction into the Homeric style and manner of treatment, and became mere echoes of the Homeric voice: in a word, Homer had so completely exhausted the epic genre, that after him further efforts were doomed to be merely conventional.
In Ionia and the islands the epic poets followed the Homeric tradition, singing of romantic subjects in the now stereotyped heroic style, and showing originality only in their choice of legends hitherto neglected or summarily and imperfectly treated.
Equally serious is the inability which Pope shared with most of the men of his time to understand the culture of the still half-barbarous
Homeric age.
They might not be distinctly
Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them.
"Trust me, sir, I have already laughed more than beseems my cloth at your
Homeric confabulation with yonder ragamuffin General of the rebels.
To his mind she lent a tone to the vulgar whirlpool of gorging humanity, as if she had been some goddess mixing in a
Homeric battle.
Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true
Homeric or Paphlagonian man -- he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here -- a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught.
Had he in his lifetime friends who loved to associate with him, and who handed down to posterity an
Homeric way of life, such as was established by Pythagoras who was so greatly beloved for his wisdom, and whose followers are to this day quite celebrated for the order which was named after him?
At this command the mountain of populace thinned so suddenly that D'Artagnan could not repress a burst of
Homeric laughter.
His bristled with ten iron beaks, so that Jehan could have disputed with Nestor's
Homeric vessel the redoubtable title of dexeubolos .
"I am not particularly knowing, but there can be no great mistake about these little
Homeric bits: they are exquisitely neat.
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or
Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later?