Socrates didn't care to visit the theater, as a rule, except when the plays of Euripides (which some think, he himself had helped to compose), were performed.
'Theogony' should be read before the great Homeric epics because it gives an account of the cosmology that is taken for granted by Homer. It does for paganism what the Old Testament attempted to do for monotheism.
There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.
The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.
I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.
I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.
You don't have to know about 'Hippolytus' to listen to 'Tragedy.'
I suppose I'd have to say that my favourite author is Homer. After Homer's Ilaid, I'd name The Odyssey, and then I'd mention a number of plays of Euripides.
What I like about Sapphics is the music of a non-iambic metric in English.
