"It is hardly possible to overestimate the importance for Western Literature of the Iliads demonstration that the fall of an enemy, no less than of a friend or leader, is tragic and not comic. With the Iliad, once for all, an objective and disinterested element enters into the poet's vision of human life. Without this element, poetry is merely instrumental to various social aims, to propaganda, to amusement, to devotion, to instruction: with it, it acquires the authority that since the Iliad it has never lost, an authority based, like the authority of science, on the vision of nature as an impersonal order."

“Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.”

“The poems of Homer purported to describe events of the early heroic golden age of , but many of the economic customs Homer described were more characteristic of the late barbaric period, just before 800 B.C.(?), when the epics were supposed to have been written. The forms of government and the economy they describe were feudal, and in some respects resembled Europe's Dark Ages. ..."Gifts" often took the place of royal revenues, taxes, and payments. ...Even craftsmen were often paid for their services in "gifts". Royal revenues also were derived from the king's personal estate, the duty of personal service, tribute, the spoils of war, piracy, and cattle raids. Armies lived off plunder; conquerors were free from taxation.”

“Seven cities warred for Homer, being dead,Who, living, had no roof to shroud his head.”

“I have found by trial Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil... For the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet. [...] Virgil was of a quiet, sedate temper; Homer was violent, impetuous, and full of fire. The chief talent of Virgil was propriety of thoughts, and ornament of words; Homer was rapid in his thoughts, and took all the liberties, both of numbers and of expressions, which his language and the age in which he lived allowed him.”

“Homer is a world; Virgil, a style.”

“Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as a blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact.”