When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'
'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate.
It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.
I think it was lucky that during most of the work on the Odyssey I lived on Homer's sea in houses that were, in one case, shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below.
I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.
Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
Would Alexander, madman as he was, have been so much a madman, had it not been for Homer?
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
