Daniel Chaikin’s Reviews > Homer's Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey. > Status Update

"But it remains a beguiling fact that the Iliad's readers generally remember Homer's horses less for their military uses than because they can also speak, weep, and drink wine. "

Longinus: "The whole Iliad, written at the height of the poet's inspiration, is full of dramatic action, while the Odyssey is mostly narrative, which is characteristic of old age. One might compare the Homer of the Odyssey to the setting sun: the grandeur remains but not the intensity. The tension is not so great as in those famous lays of the Iliad, the great passages are not sustained without weakening...

Slow going - 4 to 6 minutes a page now.

(Neoclassical humor)

Sarrasin:

Nine Years, Achilles, fair as Day,
And valiant as his Sword in Battle,
Cry'd for his Mistress, ta'en away,
Like Little Master for his Rattle

(1774)

René Rapin on book 23 of the Iliad (1664): "Would someone on a two-year voyage from the Indies to Paris spend a month in Dieppe playing backgammon?"

Homer is still being allegorized. The Iliad remains recalcitrant, but the Odyssey continues to deliver messages for our times. ... contemporary practitioners read the Odyssey as an allegory (a word they choose to avoid) of man's search for identity or struggle for self-awareness, this theme acquiring for many of Homer's current readers the vogue that moral didacticism had for the Renaissance.