Recently Read: Homer's Odyssey
I've recently finished reading Homer's Odyssey. I read The Iliad a long time ago, and found it very boring. So I was apprehensive about reading this. Those fears were unfounded though, as, in contrast, this was much more fun. In fact, it felt as if it had been written by a completely different person. The Iliad was like a long poem. This was more like a work of fiction . I emphasise fiction as this was very much the case. Obviously, tales of gods and monsters and trips to the underworld are always going to be somewhat fictional. However, there's always the perception with these ancient Greek works that there's some grain of truth beneath the mythology. There was very little sense of that deeper reality here. Here it read entirely like a work of fiction. It also felt a little bit like medieval fiction. Some of the themes, such as Penelope unpicking the shroud she was weaving, felt like fairy tale motifs. So, as ever, my mind couldn't help but question the dating an...
