Of the myriad appeals tendered for why one should read Homer, the most compelling is consistently overlooked. Certainly the dramatic narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey might provide justification alone. The wanderings of Odysseus, his archetypal personal struggles mirroring our own struggles with people, nature, and events, and his subsequent resurrection from obscurity to kingship are original and unmatched. The same holds for the Iliad, the magisterial narrative of the ruinous divine anger of Achilles who entreats his mother, the goddess Thetis, to bring death to his fellow Greeks for their disrespect and loses his best friend Patroclus as an unintended consequence. Other justifications are ready at hand. The Homeric epics form the bedrock of the literature of Western civilization, supplying material for the Athenian tragedians, Rome’s Virgil, and our own Milton, Pope, Tennyson, and Joyce. Knowledge of Homer lends cultural depth to all subsequent literature, including the New Testament, whose authors’ minds were filled with Homer, as were those of all the literate classes of antiquity. Yet the most significant reason to read the epics, and perhaps the central reason the epics have survived, is the magnificence of the poetry itself, perfected over centuries of oral tradition and finally set down in writing after the transition from the early script known as Linear B to the imported Greek alphabet. The epics are the cumulative voice of an entire culture announcing its arrival on Earth with its attendant triumphs and failings.

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