"This is the key term for our study: Greek 'patris' - 'fatherland, from which the term 'patriotism' has been formed in order to denote 'love of fatherland'.
In his 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' ( 'Sweet and seemly is it to die for fatherland' ), Horace [a favourite author of Nietzsche's] had in his mind Homer's line:
'It is no unseemly thing for him to die in defence of fatherland' (Iliad 15.496,7) .

"The Greek words for 'fatherland' are used in the Iliad nearly fifty, in the Odyssey, nearly a hundred times; and in both poems alike, with a deep and constant affection. In Homer, Patriotism meets with its first recorder in all but its modern name".[Roberts, 'Patriotic Poetry']

As Roberts points out, 'Odysseus's master passion is the love of home and fatherland. The Odyssey is not only an epic of manly adventure; it is also an epic of Patriotism.
'The following words of Odysseus -"Nothing is sweeter than a man's own fatherland and parents".
[Odyssey 9.34]
- begin a short essay by Lucian entitled,'Praise of the Fatherland'.Lucian, who lived under the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, shows how the golden thread of patriotism goes from the Greeks to the Romans.

"The Homeric poems kept alive for centuries the best ideals of patriotism; the love alike of the soil and of the noble men and women whom it breeds".[Roberts,ib.]

Astonishingly, this Graeco-Roman ideal of Patriotism is found living and breathing in Shakespeare; no wonder Nietzsche said of Shakespeare, that he had fully understood the 'type' Caesar.

And this leads us to the 'type' of Fatherland;"Among our own poets, from Shakespeare onwards, it is England not as a collection of great cities, but as a sea-girt island that most enchants the imagination: 'This royal throne of Kings, this scepter'd isle' (KRII,ii.1.40)".[Roberts,ib.]

With the powerhouse base of Greek, Roman and the Shakespearean, English poetry abounds in the highest expressions of this island Patriotism;

"This isle,The greatest and the best of all the main".[Milton,'Comus']

"The inviolate island of the sage and the free".[Lord Byron, 'Childe Harold']

"A virtuous populace may rise the while,And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov'd isle".[Spenser,'Faery Qveene']

And doesn't the patriotic view of England as the 'green and pleasant land' find its parallel in the ancient Greek poets;"Thou radiant wearer of the violent crown, thou theme of minstrelsy, bulwark of Greece, renowned Athens, citadel divine".[Pindar,'Dith.' 54]