Augustus Taber Murray

Augustus Taber Murray (1866–1940) was an American classical philologist and translator and a Quaker minister. He was Professor of Greek at Stanford University for forty years. Quotes The Odyssey (1918) Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he saved not his comrades, though he desired it sore, for through their own blind folly they perished—fools, who devoured the kine of Helios Hyperion; but he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where thou wilt, tell thou even unto us. Bk. 1, l. 1 The Iliad (1924) He who would know Homer must approach him with an open mind and lend himself to the guidance of the poet himself. He must not come to the study of the poems with a preconceived notion of the processes by which they have come into being, or of philological or archaeological criteria for determining the relative age of this episode or of that. The reconstructed Iliads are all figments of the imagination; the existent poem is a tangible fact. To this extent the unbiassed student starts as a "unitarian." If he but yields himself to the spell of the poem, he will become the more confirmed in his faith; and though he may find much of the learning of the world arrayed against him, yet he will none the less be standing in a goodly company of those whom the Muse has loved, and will himself have heard the voice of the goddess and looked upon her face. Introduction The wrath do thou sing, O goddess, of Peleus’ son, Achilles, that baneful wrath which brought countless woes upon the Achaeans, and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls of warriors, and made themselves to be a spoil for dogs and all manner of birds; and thus the will of Zeus was being brought to fulfilment;—sing thou thereof from the time when at the first there parted in strife Atreus’ son, king of men, and goodly Achilles. Bk. 1, l. 1 External links Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:Quakers Category:1866 births Category:1940 deaths Category:Philologists Category:Translators from the United States Category:Stanford University faculty Category:Translators of Homer