Archive for November, 2007

Edinburgh Walks – Part I of a Series

One of the most astonishing passages in Homer is the simile in Book XV of the Iliad, which describes the rapidity of Hera’s flight to Olympus (Il. XV, 79ff.):

but went back to tall Olympos from the mountains of Ida
As the thought flashes in the mind of a man who, traversing
much territory, thinks of things in the mind’s awareness,
‘I wish I were this place, or this’, and imagines many things;
so rapidly in her eagerness winged Hera, a goddess.
—trans. Richmond Lattimore