Quotes from Caroline Alexander

We honor the Greeks because in their art, literature, philosophy and civic history we discern the early stirrings of our own ideals—rationalism, humanism, democracy—which first took firm root in Athenian soil.

Thus he prayed, and Phoebus Apollo heard him, and set out from the heights of Olympus, rage in his heart, with his bow on his shoulders and his hooded quiver; the arrows clattered on his shoulders as he raged, as the god himself moved; and he came like the night. Then far from the ships he crouched, and let loose an arrow – and terrible was the ring of his silver bow.

Priam and Achilles meet in the very twilight of their lives. Their extinction is certain and there will be no reward for behaving well, and yet, in the face of implacable fate and an indifferent universe, they mutually assert the highest ideals of their humanity.

The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause.

Surely, by all convention, the Iliad will end here, with the triumphant return of its vindicated hero. But the Iliad is not a conventional epic, and at the very moment of its hero's greatest military triumph, Homer diverts his focus from Achilles to the epic's two most important casualties, Patroklos and Hektor: it is to the consequences of their deaths, especially to the victor, that all action of the Iliad has been inexorably leading.

This, the only occasion in the Iliad when furious Achilles smiles serves as a bittersweet reminder of the difference real leadership could have made to the events of the Iliad. Agamemnon's panicked prize-grabbing in Book One and even Nestor's rambling authority pale beside Achilles' instinctive and absolute command of himself and the dangers of this occasion.

Homer's epic does not tell of such seemingly essential events as the abduction of Helen, for example, nor of the mustering and sailing of the Greek fleet, the first hostilities of the war, the Trojan Horse, and the sacking and burning of Troy. Instead, the 15,693 lines of Homer's Iliad describe the occurrences of a roughly two-week period in the tenth and final year of what had become a stalemated siege of Troy.

Nestor is the spokesman for the status quo, for the tradition-hallowed belief that institutional power equates with unquestioned authority.

the tortured master's mate, his long hair loose, his shirt collar open, he with his gentlemanly pedigree and almost mythic name: Fletcher Christian.

of cattle, a bringer of dreams

When conditions allowed, he ordered fires lit to dry his men's sodden gear.

Mandatory, and soon despised, dancing sessions were implemented under this same improving philosophy.

Bligh made an announcement. "I now thought it for the Good of the Service to give Mr. Fletcher Christian an Acting Order as Lieut. I therefore Ordered it to be read to all hands.

It would seem that to Bligh, infliction of punishment was like sickness, and scurvy, something that had no place on a well-run ship. William Bligh had set out to make the perfect voyage.