The fable was well known in Ancient Greece; Athenaeus records that Hieronymus of Rhodes, in his Historical Notes, quoted an epigram of Sophocles against Euripides that parodied the story of Helios and Boreas.[2] It related how Sophocles had his cloak stolen by a boy to whom he had made love. Euripides joked that he had had that boy too, and it did not cost him anything. Sophocles´ reply satirises the adulteries of Euripides: "It was the Sun, and not a boy, whose heat stripped me naked; as for you, Euripides, when you were kissing someone else´s wife the North Wind screwed you. You are unwise, you who sow in another´s field, to accuse Eros of being a snatch-thief."
ellauri026.html on line 225: The idea is there, but all the lingering emphasis in the original has been smoothed away. This, too, unfortunately, is typical of the whole. I have said that Wilson’s translation reads easily, and it does, like a modern novel: at shockingly few points does one ever need to stop and think. There are no hard parts; no difficult lines or obscure notions; no aesthetic arrest either; very little that jumps out as unusual or different. Wilson has set out, as she openly confesses, to produce an Odyssey in a “contemporary anglophone speech,” and this results in quite a bit of conceptual pruning. If you wait for the “Homeric tags,” the phrases that contained so much Greek culture they have been quoted over and over again by Greeks ever since—well, you are apt to miss them as they go by. A famous one occurs in book 24, when Odysseus and Telemachus are about to go into battle together: Odysseus tells Telemachus not to disgrace him, and Telemachus boasts that he need not fear. Laertes, Odysseus’s father, exclaims (Wilson’s translation), “Ah, gods! A happy day for me! My son and grandson are arguing about how tough they are!”
ellauri026.html on line 227: This is a famous line, but here it would hardly seem to merit its fame—who cares about people “arguing about how tough they are”? The word here translated as “tough” just happens to be one of the central words of Hellenic thought: arete, “virtue” or “excellence,” that subject of so many subsequent philosophy lectures—whose learnability or unlearnability Plato made the subject of inquiry, and which Aristotle defined as a mean between two vices. The word can be used to mean something like “bravery,” but it is wildly broader and richer than “how tough one is” (there is a queen named Arete in the poem, but Wilson refrains from translating her as “Queen Tough”). The line was quoted over and over again in later days because it was considered the height of happiness for a man to have a son and grandson competing with each other to possess virtue or true excellence. This Wilson suppresses, as a thing irrelevant to contemporary idiom—“toughness” will have to serve in its place.
ellauri032.html on line 251: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point, how often one has heard that quoted, and quoted often to the wrong purpose! For this is by no means an exaltation of the ‘heart’ over the ‘head’, a defence of unreason. The heart, in Pascal’s terminology, is itself truly rational if it is truly the heart. For him, in theological matters which seemed to him much larger, more difficult, and more important than scientific matters, the whole personality is involved.
ellauri048.html on line 1122: The most frequently quoted lines in the poem are:
ellauri053.html on line 1164:

Eliot quoted, in evidence, four short passages from The Cutting of an Agate, in which Yeats says that the poet must “be content to find his pleasure in all that is for ever passing away that it may come again, in the beauty of woman, in the fragile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion, in whatever is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it were, for its own perfection, most eager to return in its glory.” Tää on puhdasta Tandoorikanaa.