Started: November 20, 2022
Finished: January 01, 2023
(This review is written using my new format for book reviews.)
Background Information
Along with The Iliad, this is the other epic poem from the 8th Century B.C. attributed to Homer. So, much of what I already said about The Iliad is going to apply here as well.
The Iliad was an epic about the Trojan War. The Odyssey takes place after the Trojan War, and is about the long journey home of Odysseus, one of the Greek heroes of the war. (Odyssey in ancient Greece means “The Story of Odysseus”). So it’s a sequel, of sorts, to The Iliad, and features many of the same characters.
Although it’s not a direct sequel. When The Iliad ends, we are still right in the thick of the Trojan War. When The Odyssey begins, the war is over, and all the heroes are going home. So there is a notable jump forward in time.
This was not a problem for the original audience. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey emerged out of an older oral tradition, so the ancient Greek audience would have already known all about the events between The Iliad and The Odyssey that weren't cover by Homer.
According to Wikipedia, The Iliad and The Odyssey were at one point part of an Epic Cycle of poems, which told the whole story of the Trojan War and the return of the heroes.
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| Taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Cycle#Contents |
...but, if I'm reading Wikipedia correctly, the other poems in the Epic Cycle were written at a later date.
In other words, first their was the oral tradition. Then, The Iliad and The Odyssey emerged. Then later, the other poems in the Epic Cycle were written to fill in the gaps that were left by The Iliad and The Odyssey. But unfortunately, the rest of the Epic Cycle was lost to history, so now we are once again left only with The Iliad and The Odyssey. (Fortunately we know much of what was in those lost epics from other sources--e.g. Posthomerica, etc, so we can still piece together the rough general story of the whole Trojan War.)
Of the two Homeric epics, I believe The Iliad was more influential in the ancient world. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong). For example, when he was on his campaigns, Alexander the Great famously carryied The Iliad around with him--not The Odyssey.
However in the modern world, The Iliad is seen as too violent and warlike for modern readers, so The Odyssey has become more widely read in today's society. Nowadays if you're ever looking at a school curriculum, you're far more likely to see The Odyssey on the reading list than The Iliad. (Although upon rereading The Odyssey, I've got to say, I was surprised by how brutal some parts of it could be. But more on that below.)
Also, in contrast to the convoluted plot of The Iliad, The Odyssey is a straightforward journey story, so that's another reason it's more accessible to modern audiences.
...except it's not that straightforward, because The Odyssey starts out in when Odysseus's journey is almost over, and then all the adventures that Odysseus had at the beginning of his journey are told in flashback.
This is what's known as in medias res (W), and, if I remember my high school literature teachers correctly, it subsequently began a convention of epic poetry. That is, because Homer started out The Odyssey using in medias res, this established the tradition that all epics had to start in medias res.
T.E. Lawrence Translation
I'm reading the T.E. Lawrence translation, just because this happens to be the translation currently in bookstores in Vietnam.
And in case you're wondering... yes, it is that T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia (W).
Did you know that in addition to becoming a messianic figure in the Middle East, and leading an epic Arab rebellion, Lawrence of Arabia also found time to do a translation of The Odyssey? What a guy, huh? T.E. Lawrence's translation was published in 1932.
(I'm not sure why the publisher switched translators. The editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey currently being sold in Vietnam are published by Arcturus press. They used the Samuel Butler translation for The Iliad, and Samuel Butler also published a translation of The Odyssey, so I'm not sure why they didn't just stick with Samuel Butler. Maybe because Lawrence of Arabia is much more famous? I don't know.)
My History With This Book
My history with The Odyssey is much the same as my history with The Iliad. I first learned the story by reading retellings designed for children and young adults. (I couldn’t now tell you the name of it, but my school library had an illustrated retelling of The Odyssey that I read in 6th grade.)
After having read The Iliad in 7th grade, I then moved on to The Odyssey. Just like The Iliad, I initially tried out a verse translation, just because this was the version that was in our school library. And, just like The Iliad, I soon gave up on the verse translation, returned it to the school library, and bought a prose translation instead from a local bookstore, which suited me much better.
Unlike my copy of The Iliad, I never saved my copy of The Odyssey. So I cannot now tell you the name of the translation I read in 7th grade. It may actually have been T.E. Lawrence version. I don’t remember.
I do, however, remember not being quite as enthralled by The Odyssey as I had been with The Iliad.
You see, The Iliad was packed full of battle scenes from beginning to end. So even though I had thought I already knew the full story of the Trojan War from various modern retellings, there were so many more stories in The Iliad--more battles, more stories of heroes fighting each other etc.
With The Odyssey, however, I didn’t feel like I got much more out of the original book that hadn’t been in the retellings. Odysseus’s adventures with the sirens, or the cyclops, or Circe, et cetera, were all pretty much the same in the original Odyssey as they had been in the young adult retellings that I had read. The only difference in the original, it seemed to me, was that there were a lot more boring speeches. Plus, I also have a memory of the end of the story, the confrontation between Odysseus and the suitors, being really drawn out in the original Odyssey.
In the years since, I've read another retelling of The Odyssey in Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang.
Why I Reread This Book
Well, once again, it's the same as with The Iliad. Steve Donoghue's Western Canon Starter Kit (video HERE) puts Homer alongside The Bible as one of the cornerstones of Western Literature. So I thought it would be good for me to reread The Iliad and The Odyssey. I picked them both up at the same bookstore, and then after finishing The Iliad, I decided to continue on to The Odyssey next. (If you're going to reread The Iliad, you pretty much have to follow it up with a rereading of The Odyssey, don't you?)
The Rereading Experience
So, I mentioned above that my memory of reading The Odyssey is that if you already know the basic story, reading the original epic doesn't really enhance the story at all, and it just adds a bunch of boring extra details and lots of speeches.
And that's pretty much my experience rereading it.
Steve Donoghue in his videos on The Odyssey remarks frequently that people who only know The Odyssey from the storybook version are frequently surprised to realize that the iconic parts of this story (Circe, the Cyclops, The Sirens, Scylla and the Charybdis, etc) actually make up only a small portion of the book. And this perfectly describes my reading experience.
If you've not read The Odyssey (or if you, like me, have been overdue for a reread), you will be surprised to learn that the journey portion of the story, where Odysseus goes to all the strange lands and meets all the strange creatures, is actually only 4 chapters (books 9, 10, 11, 12) out of 24. Or less than 20% of the story.
So what makes up the other 80% of the book?
The bulk of the book is building up to the confrontation with the suitors.
Again, this is different than most modern retellings. In modern retellings, the battle with the suitors is usually just a coda to the journeys of Odysseus. But in The Odyssey, it is very much the central conflict of the book. And, oh man, is there ever a lot of build up.
Odysseus finishes telling the story of his strange adventures in book 12, and the battle with the suitors doesn't happen until book 22. During that time, there's a whole lot of talk about how Odysseus is going to get his revenge on the suitors, but actual events move forward at a snail's pace.
The translator of my edition, Lawrence of Arabia, thinks that this was deliberate padding. In ancient Greece, these epics were sung by a travelling bard, who likely song one chapter every night at dinner, so delaying the climax for 10 more chapters meant ten more free dinners. As Lawrence puts it:
"Perhaps the tedious delay of the climax through ten books may be a poor bard's means of prolonging his host's hospitality." (Translator's Introduction, p.9)
For a counterview, see Steve Donoghue, who believes that this long build up is just a way of expertly priming the reader (listener) so that when the hammer does finally drop on the suitors, their comeuppance is all the more satisfying because we've been primed to hate them for so many chapters.
As for me personally, I tend to side more with Lawrence of Arabia.
I have to admit, I found the whole conflict with the suitors to be a bit boring. And upon rereading this book, I was fully reminded of why this book never stuck with me the way The Iliad did.
I know, I know, I'm a philistine. This is one of the foundational works of Western Literature, and through the centuries it has been praised by many men who were a lot smarter than I am.
So I don't want to give the impression that I was completely incapable of understanding it. There were a number of things I enjoyed about the book. So let’s talk about the positives.
The Positives
* I mentioned above that the fantastic journey part of this book is surprisingly short--only 4 chapters out of 24. But, short though they were, those 4 chapters are a lot of fun.
I suspect that most people are already familiar with all the major events that happen in these chapters--Cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the journey to the land of the dead, the land of the lotus-eaters, etc. Most of us hear these stories in childhood, and remember them well even as adults. I mean, I already knew what was going to happen with Odysseus and Circe, and I already knew how Odysseus was going to defeat the Cyclops. But I still enjoyed reading through it again anyway. Some good stories are just so much fun that you don’t mind hearing them again and again.
[If by some chance you haven’t yet heard these stories, you’re in for a treat. Be sure to check them out. Only don’t start out with Homer’s Odyssey. Just like The Iliad, just like anything from ancient Greek literature, the author is already assuming you know the basic story because in ancient Greece you would have already grown up in a culture where all these stories were already familiar because of the oral tradition. So Homer isn’t going to waste any time getting you up to speed on the background information you need to know to understand the story. Instead start with the Classics Illustrated version, or Andrew Lang, or Bulfinch or any other modern retelling. But do check these stories out. They are so much fun.]
* In my review of The Iliad, I mentioned that one of the really fun things about that book was seeing how interconnected the whole world of Greek Mythology was. And this is definitely true of The Odyssey as well. The very first chapter starts out with Zeus talking about the story of Orestes, Agamemnon and Aegisthus.
Now, none of those characters are in The Odyssey. To find out their story, you have to read a completely separate set of stories--the Oresteia. (This is yet another reason why you wouldn't want to jump straight into The Odyssey before you've read a few books on Greek mythology generally.) But I find the tapestry of Greek mythology--the web of individual, yet interconnected stories, to be fascinating.
The Odyssey isn't quite as interesting as The Iliad in this regard. The Iliad was constantly throwing references back to the age of heroes--the generation right before the Trojan War. The Odyssey, by contrast, only has a few references back to the age of heroes. But although it's not quite as impressive as The Iliad, it's still fun to see.
* The scenes with the gods and goddess were also fun.
Again, this is something that was better in The Iliad. In The Iliad, we had a lot of scenes of the gods and goddess squabbling with each other on Mount Olympus. The Odyssey has much fewer, but the scenes they do have are still fun. (The Greek gods were a very colorful bunch.)
One scene that I remember reading in 7th grade, and which stuck in my head very clearly in the subsequent years, was when Ares and Aphrodite were having sex together, and the god Hephaestus (the husband of Aphrodite) devised a metal net to fall down on them and trap them in the act, and then while Ares and Aphrodite were trapped in this compromising position, all the other gods gathered around to view and make jokes. (I grew up in a very sheltered environment, so this was one of the first cases I remember of sex being referenced in literature.)
* Lastly, The Odyssey can be very interesting for its description of daily life in ancient Greece.
The Iliad, which took place almost exclusively on the battle field, didn't give us very many descriptions of what normal domestic life was like. But The Odyssey is full of descriptions of what the dining halls were like, what kind of clothes people were wearing, what kinds of food they were eating, et cetera.
I'm reminded once again of the George R.R. Martin quote I've used a couple - times before on this blog--"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one." Through the magic of reading this book, we get some glimpse into what life was like for people 3,000 years ago.
Speaking of which, anyone who reads The Odyssey will be immediately struck by the theme of hospitality. This is actually not something I had remembered from my first reading, but reading it again, I was struck by how over and over again the book emphasized how important hospitality was in the ancient world. (Characters are constantly giving speeches about the importance of hospitality. You absolutely cannot miss it as a theme.)
On the Homeric Question
As you probably know, although tradition assigns The Iliad and The Odyssey both to Homer, there’s been a long debate about whether Homer wrote both poems, or whether Homer even existed.
Lawrence of Arabia, the translator of my edition, believed that the author of The Odyssey did not live at the same time The Iliad was composed, but was of a generation that grew up in the shadow of The Iliad. Speaking of the writer of The Odyssey, Lawrence writes:
"His generation so rudely admired The Iliad that even to misquote it was a virtue" (translator's introduction, p.9)
For a contrasting view, see Steve Donoghue, who argues that: "when you read them, I don't think there's any doubt in the world that The Iliad and The Odyssey were both written entirely by one person."
As for me, I've got to say that after having now re-read The Iliad and The Odyssey both within the same year, to me they certainly feel like they were written by different authors.
But then, of course, I was reading the work of two different translators. So of course these books would feel different. Those of us who can't read the original ancient Greek really shouldn't attempt to have an opinion about the Homeric Question.
But... since this is my blog, and everyone can spout off their own two cents on their own blog, I do feel like pointing out some differences I've noticed.
The author of The Iliad went to great lengths to make us feel sympathy with both sides of the conflict. It was not a story of good guys versus bad guys--there were good men on both sides of the war.
The Odyssey, by contrast, definitely has a set of bad guys. The author of The Odyssey emphasizes over and over and over again how awful the suitors are, and when they all get killed at the end, we are meant to feel that they are only getting what's coming to them.
Extended Quotation
From the end of Book 1:
Eurymachus son of Polybus then put in his word. ‘Telemachus, the question of which Greek shall reign over this island lies on the lap of the Gods. Yet assuredly you shall possess your belongings and have the lordship in your own houses: nor against your will shall any man come and strip you of them forcibly while Ithaca holds an inhabitant. But my good lad, let me question you about that visitor of yours who slipped away so suddenly that none of us had time to make him out. Yet his face was not the face of a negligible man. Whence came he and what country gave he as his own? Where do his kindred live and where are the corn-lands of his family? Did he come with news of your father, or on some business of his own?’
Discreetly Telemachus reassured him: ‘Eurymachus, the time of my father’s return is long over. I do not now credit any messages regarding him, whatever their source. Nor does any soothsaying take me in: though my mother may at whiles call some noted diviner to the palace and seek sooth of him. As for the stranger, he is a former friend of our family from Taphos called Mentes, whose father was old wise-minded Anchialus. Mentes is a man of authority among the seafaring Taphians.’ So he said: but secretly Telemachus was sure of the immortal Goddess. Howbeit the suitors turned to dance and to the enthralling song, making merry while the evening drew down; and they celebrated until evening had darkened into night. Then the longing for sleep took them and they scattered, each man to the house where he lodged.
The mind of Telemachus was perplexedly brooding over many things as he also sought his bed within his own room, which was contrived in the highest part of the main building, that stately landmark of the country-side. Eurycleia the daughter of Ops son of Peisenor, attended him, lighting his way with flaring slips of pine-wood — Eurycleia the trusted, the adept, who, in the flush of her youth, had been bought by Laertes, out of his great wealth, for the price of twenty oxen. In the house Laertes had esteemed her even as his beloved wife, but never dared have intercourse with her, fearing the temper of his wife. Of all the servants it was Eurycleia who most loved Telemachus, for she had nursed him when he was a tiny child. Accordingly it was she who lighted him to his well-built room.
He flung open its doors and sat himself on the couch. There he pulled off his long clinging tunic, which the old woman received into her skillful hands and folded and patted into smoothness before she hung it on the clothes-peg beside his fretted, inlaid bedstead. Then she quitted the chamber, pulling-to the door after her by the silver beak which served as handle and sliding the bolt across by its leathern thong. And there Telemachus lay all night, wrapped in a choice fleece, pondering in his heart how he should compass the journey enjoined upon him by Athene. (p.24-25)
***END QUOTE***
I know I took that out of context, so the conversations between Telemachus and the suitors may not make a lot of sense. But nonetheless, notice all the little details here about daily life--the pine-wood torch, the clothes-peg by the bedstead, the sliding bolt on the door, et cetera. The Odyssey has much more of these details than The Iliad.
Other Stray Observations
* In my review of The Iliad, I was originally intending to write about this weird empathy disconnect that I noticed in the book. But I ended up cutting my review of The Iliad short once I realized it was getting too long, so I never wrote about it after all.
But briefly, here's what I wanted to write:
The Iliad is a very brutal book, where Achilles and the rest of the Greek heroes relentlessly slaughter the Trojans, even when the Trojans are begging them for mercy. It's hard to read at times, but as you're reading it, you end up just telling yourself, "Well, these men lived in different times. Back in those days, a warrior was cold and brutal and heartless."
And if the Greek heroes had been portrayed that way throughout--as cold, unfeeling, killing machines--men whose basic human emotions had just been numbed by the brutality of constant battle--then I think I could have made sense of it.
But the weird thing is--they were all constant crybabies. Achilles cried constantly about how he was disrespected or dishonored. At the funeral games for Patroclus, the other heroes cried whenever they lost a contest.
It was a weird disconnect to see them so cold and heartless on the battlefield, but yet so whiny and tearful.
I'm guessing that this over-emoting was done to heighten the drama of the story. That is, I doubt the ancient Greeks actually acted like this (although who knows, maybe they did), but when you're telling a story, you want to wring as much emotion and drama as you can from it, and one way to do that is by having your characters get super emotional about every single thing. After all, if the characters aren't emotionally invested in their own needs and wants, then how can you expect the audience to get invested?
But regardless of the reason, that same empathy disconnect was all through The Odyssey. Odysseus is constantly crying about how he misses his home and his family, and he works himself into a furious rage when he thinks about how the suitors are trying to take away his wife, and are depleting his wealth by eating his cattle and goats.
But then, this same Odysseus feels no remorse about sacking and destroying towns, killing all the men, and taking the women, just because he encounters them on his voyage home.
As Odysseus is retelling his voyages in book 9, he says,
From Ilion, the wind served me to near Ismarus of the Cicones. I sacked the city and slew them. Their wives and wealth we took and divided precisely, so that no one of us, through me, should go short of his just share." (p.128)
So Odysseus thinks nothing of depriving other men of their wives and wealth, but whines endlessly when other people do it to him. What kind of a hero is that?
(Is this a problem with the text? Or is the author of The Odyssey intentionally trying to play with the irony of making Odysseus a hypocrite.)
* Connected to the above point...
In my review of Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang, one of my many criticisms of Andrew Lang was his use of the title Ulysses, the Sacker of Cities ("Ulysses" being the Latin for "Odysseus"). But I take this particular criticism back. Several times in The Odyssey, Odysseus is identified as someone who is prone to sack cities.
*********************************************************************************
As I mentioned above, although The Iliad is generally more violent than The Odyssey, in some ways The Odyssey is more brutal.
Particularly at the end with the slaughter of the suitors.
And particularly when Odysseus and his son Telemachus execute the maids who had been sleeping with the suitors.
CONTENT WARNING ahead.
…but cunning Odysseus forbade her. “By no means call her yet. Bid me in those women who have been disorderly”; and away at his word went the old dame through the house, warning the women and hustling them forward: while Odysseus called to Telemachus, to the stockman and to the swineherd, saying with energy, “Start to clear away the dead, making the women do the work; and then swill down the rich seats and tables with water and fibrous sponges. Afterwards, when you have restored the whole house to order, take these servants outside the stately hall to that spot between the round vault and the courtyard’s strong boundary wall and there slaughter them with your long swords till the last life is spent and their love-passages with the suitors are whole out of mind.”So he bade them, and the erring women trailed in, all huddled together and crying great bitter tears of woe. First they bore out the dead and laid them in heaps along the portico of the walled court--Odysseus directing that work himself and driving them, for it took force to make them do it--and then they cleaned down the noble thrones and tables with water and soft sponges, while Telemachus with the swineherd and cattle-man scraped down the floor of the strong house with hoes, the maids carrying for them to a dump out of doors. When the house was tidy they led the women servants beyond the great hall and penned them in that blind place between vault and boundary wall, whence escape was impossible. “It irks me,” he said, “to give any sort of clean death to women who have heaped shame on my head and my mother’s, and have wantoned with the suitors.” That was what he said. He made fast a dark-prowed ship’s hawser to a pillar and strained it round the great spiral of the vault, at too great a height for anyone to touch the floor with her feet. Sometimes in a shrubbery men so stretch out nets, upon which long-winded thrushes or doves alight on their way to roost: and fatal the perch proves. Exactly thus were the women’s all held a-row with a bight of cord drawn around each throat, to suffer their caitiff’s death. A little while they twittered with their feet--only a little. It was not long.Melanthius they dragged through the entry and the court, sliced his nose and ears with their cruel swords and tore out his privates, which they fed raw to the dogs. Their spite made them also cut off his hands and feet…. (Book 22, pages 298-299)
Right, where to even begin with this?
First of all, The Iliad, for all its violence, never depicted violence against women. (I’m not forgetting anything, am I?) So this strikes me as being more brutal than The Iliad on that note alone.
But also, as John Green points out in his video on The Odyssey, there’s a hypocritical double standard that runs all through the book. These women are executed simply for sleeping with the wrong men. But Odysseus sleeps with many women throughout his adventures, and not all of those women were angels (Circe, for instance, seems to have had a malevolent streak.) Plus, as we mentioned above, earlier in The Odyssey, Odysseus had bragged about killing the Cicones and just taking their women for sexual pleasure.
And then that part about poor Melanthius, Odysseus’s goatherd. That’s really brutal, isn’t it? And once again, this seems to be even in excess of anything in The Iliad. The Iliad had plenty of scenes of violence, but no depictions of anyone being tortured. (Again, I’m not forgetting anything, right?) And Melanthius wasn’t even one of the hated suitors--he was just on friendly terms with them. So his punishment seems really excessive.
I won’t lie, the description here haunts me a bit with its casual brutality--for example the way it says they actually “pulled” his privates off instead of just slicing them off. That’s really sick and twisted, isn’t it?
…but then, I have to remind myself that this is all fiction, and it’s just words on a page and none of this actually happened. (One of the oddities of the human brain is that sometimes our brain emotionally engages with fictional stories as if they were real events. There’s probably an evolutionary psychology explanation behind this--perhaps something about how our brain’s desire to hear stories originated as a way to get useful information about people we had to interact with daily in our local tribe, so consequently our brain tends to engage with stories as if they were real. But that’s a digression to explore on another day.)
But anyway… what to make of all of this? Does the author of The Odyssey just have really sick and twisted values? Or is the author intending to evoke our disgust and revulsion? Is the author intending for us to disapprove of Odysseus and his actions?
I had the exact same questions when I was reading The Iliad--as I wrote at some length in my review of The Iliad--and now I’m back here again with The Odyssey. What are we supposed to make of this book?
Plans for Future Reading (and watching)
* So, after 30 years, I've now finally reread The Iliad and The Odyssey. I probably shouldn't wait another 30 years before I read them again.
The great Steve Donoghue actually rereads these books every year. But Steve's a much more prolific reader than I'll ever be. I'll just aim to read them again in another 5, or maybe 10 years.
And when I do, I should really try out some different translations next time around.
* And speaking of translators, I'm also overdue to rewatch Lawrence of Arabia one of these days. I've seen it twice--once as an adolescent, once in my late 20s, but I'm due now for another viewing, and then doing a review on my Thoughts after Re-Watching project.
But as I've mentioned before, watching full movies is a bit difficult nowadays. So it could be a few years before I get around to it.
Links
* In 2006, I thought I had finished my time in Japan, and was anxious to return to my hometown. However, I extended my stay in Japan for a couple more months because of a girl. I referred to her on this blog on 2 occasions as “Calypso” (here and here). The idea being (tongue-in-cheek, of course) that she was preventing me from returning to my hometown and keeping me on island, just like the nymph Calypso had done to Odysseus.
I thought I was being clever.
* I've mentioned this in passing above, but see also my review of Classics Illustrated: The Odyssey.
* In preparing this review, I watched a lot of booktube and Youtube videos on The Odyssey:
Steve Donoghue: Homer-Along: The Odyssey Part 1! https://youtu.be/WeQRWGKRzvE
Steve Donoghue: Homer-Along: The Odyssey Part 2! https://youtu.be/BWa92jahXnI
Steve Donoghue: Homer-Along 2018: The Odyssey Part 3! https://youtu.be/OI62yUzn2MU
Steve Donoghue: Homer-Along 2018: The Odyssey Concludes! https://youtu.be/ZKm7u6Abxeg
Steve Donoghue: Mayberry Book Club: The Odyssey - Part 1! https://youtu.be/VMfSTZQPSDY
Steve Donoghue: The Mayberry Book Club: The Odyssey - Part 2! https://youtu.be/3Y0z2tkMGbA
Mayberry Bookclub: The Odyssey, by Homer | Books 1-6 https://youtu.be/47-sDvCFrxI
Mayberry Bookclub: The Odyssey, by Homer | Books 7-12 https://youtu.be/PWUkQfZrRhs
A Long and Difficult Journey, or The Odyssey: Crash Course Literature 201 https://youtu.be/MS4jk5kavy4
7 out of 10 Stars. I gave The Iliad 9 out of 10 stars, in spite of all its many problems. The Odyssey is in a similar category. Massively problematic, and yet also massively fascinating. But, for my money at least, not quite as impressive as The Iliad.
November 20, 2022 The Odyssey p.1-116
November 27, 2022 The Odyssey p.116-168
December 4, 2022 The Odyssey p.168-192
December 18, 2022 The Odyssey p.192-204
December 23, 2022 The Odyssey p.204-212
January 1, 2023 The Odyssey p.212-320
Video Review (Playlist HERE)
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