I guess I might have liked this more if I hadn't read it in relation to the group read of the Odyssey. Wolf, who had been studying Homer, one notices that one is a fair distance away from either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Jung responding to Freud, who is responding to Neitzsche, who was writing in response to Goethe, who was commenting upon F.A. Manguel here can be interesting, but when we have C.G. The opinions of Byron and Blake on the translations of the Iliad and Odyssey by Alexander Pope - who cares? A chapter on Homer in medieval Islam in which the only interesting thing that is said is that there was no medieval translation of Homer into Arabic? Ditto a chapter on 'Christian' Homer which is about saints Jerome and Augustine having their cake and eat it - being both Christian and finding a place generally for pagan literature, with nothing specific to say about Homer, within the new religion? One feels the tree wants a vigorous pruning, perhaps to raise the crown and reduce the canopy by half or so. Following Homer through the greatest literature ever created, Manguel’s book above all delights in the poems themselves, the “primordial spring without which there would have been no culture.”Ī book about the reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey, from the mighty trunk run branches, and from the branches twigs. He considers their original purpose, either as allegory or record of history, surveys the challenges the pagan poems presented to the early Christian world, and traces their spread after the Reformation. In this graceful and sweeping addition to the Books that Change the World Series, Alberto Manguel traces the lineage of the epic poems. They have fed our imagination for over two and a half millennia, inspiring everyone from Plato to Virgil, Pope to Joyce, Dante to Wolfgang Petersen.

The Iliad and The Odyssey, with their incomparable tales of the Trojan War, brace Achilles, Ulysses and Penelope, the Cyclops, the beautiful Helen of Troy, and the petulant gods, are familiar to most readers because they are so pervasive. No one knows if there was a man named Homer, but there is no little doubt that the epic poems assembled under his name form the cornerstone of Western literature.

The odyssey and the iliad book