Homeric moments

I’ve read The Odyssey in various translations, although I’m not nearly so familiar with The Iliad. This book looked like an interesting way to explore new-to-me aspects of both poems. It lived up to its promise.

There are just under 50 chapters, each examining some theme such as the roles of certain characters, or use of epithets. The chapters are short and I found them easy to read, with an enthusiastic but not over-simplified style. During discussion of poetic form, there are occasional quotations from the “original” Greek text. These were presented as transliterated text, which took a while to get used to.

I initially dipped into a few topics that caught my eye, then settled down to read from the start. The early chapters refer to both poems while the later ones concentrate on The Odyssey. At times I found myself thinking, “Ah, she makes a good point,” or “I must keep an eye out for more examples.” And that is surely a good thing :)

An epic worth reading for its historical value, but somewhat struggling to hold up today. There's a great story in here, but the pacing is awful, with huge sections that are just people droning on with pleasantries and eating meat together. The structure is good though, and I bet you could cut those 24 books down to 12 without losing much!

As with the Iliad, I chose to read Alexander Pope's version, a rich and grandiose translation into heroic couplets, and I'm glad I did; the rhyme and meter feel like the English equivalent of Homer's original, and the now-archaic language lends an ancient reverence to the poem that I think Greeks in the classical period would have got from Homer.

I continued my "reading as a serial" experiment, setting up an RSS feed to deliver me one book per week. This seems to be a really good way to motivate myself to read, since a huge tome like this can be quite daunting.