“It has been said that Homer was the Bible of the Greeks. The remark exactly misses the truth. The Greeks fortunately had no Bible, and this fact was both an expression and an important condition of their freedom. Homer's poems were secular, not religious, and it may be noted that they are freer from immorality and savagery than sacred books that one could mention.”

— J. B. Bury, book A History of Freedom of Thought

p. 24 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t71v5g25n;view=1up;seq=28 <br class="br">A History of Freedom of Thought (1913)

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J. B. Bury11

Irish historian and freethinker 1861–1927

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“For our genius of a father did not limit himself to math. His brain was an octopus, the tentacles of which extended in all directions. He could scan Latin verse and Greek verse as well, and it was as if he were hearing Homer or Theocritus in person. Not to mention the fact that he read Greek from volumes filled with characters which in no way resembled the ones in our Greek grammar or book of excerpts from Greek literature. He also read Sanskrit, with its truly bizarre letters. He spoke Italian like Dante, Spanish like Cervantes, and so for almost every living language.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

From At home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil, pp. 31–32 https://books.google.com/books?id=OdeDlT9-GBUC&pg=PA31 <br class="br">Quote About

“It would be foolhardy to swell the pages of this book with an exhaustive list of Greco-Hebrew differences. Everyone knows that Homer is very different from the Bible.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])

“Though the poems of Homer and his successors were recorded, there will be no Greek reading public till we reach the fifth century B. C. …There was instead, a hearing public that formed responsive audiences at festivals and contests.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

“It has often been said, that anything may be proved from the Bible, but before anything can be admitted as proved by the Bible, the Bible itself must be proved to be true; for if the Bible be not true, or the truth of it be doubtful, it ceases to have authority, and cannot be admitted as proof of anything.”

Thomas Paine book The Age of Reason

1790s, The Age of Reason, Part II (1795)

“For a thousand years, the Bible was almost the only book people read, if they could read at all. The stories that were officially told and portrayed were Biblical and religious stories. That other fount of Western civilization as we know it today — the Greek classics — went largely unknown until the Renaissance. For our purposes, there's a noteworthy difference between these two literatures: in the Bible people are hardly ever said to be mad as such, whereas in Greek drama they go off their rockers with alarming frequency. It was the rediscovery of the classics that stimulated the long procession of literary madpeople of the past four hundred years.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

“Troy is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer, according to the credits. Homer's estate should sue.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/troy-2004 of Troy (14 May 2004) <br class="br">Reviews, Two star reviews

“To me, the Bible is a book. Important, no doubt, but a book.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Interview to the newspaper "O Globo", 2009.

“But the parallels go further, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians after their subordination to others and emigration or expulsion from their original homelands became Diaspora ethno-religious communities cultivating the particular virtues and aptitudes of their traditions. These included a respect for scholarship and learning, derived from constant study of sacred texts (and in the Greek case some of their ancient secular texts seen through religious filters); and hence a generally high status accorded to religious scholars and clergy within each enclave. Allied to this was a marked aptitude for literary expression—poetic, philosophical, legal, liturgical, linguistic, and historical.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999), Chapter: Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

“It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer.”

Richard Bentley (1662–1742) English classical scholar and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge

Of Pope's translation of The Iliad — as quoted in The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Eleven Volumes by John Hawkins, Vol. IV (1787), The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, "Life of Pope", footnote on p. 126.

“In Homer, existence
is flawed; transcendence, conditional;
' the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

To a Giraffe
Poetry

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J. B. Bury11

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