The Core Blog

It is difficult for me to buy into Richard Lattimore's claim that "symbolism and allegory seem foreign to the biology of early Greek epic." (p. 15) Turning a bunch of lonely, wandering sailors into swine? It doesn't seem that one can get more symbolic than that.

But Lattimore is the expert, and I don't think I, with my casual reading of the great tragedies as experience, am going to begin questioning him. Instead, I'll try to stick to the surface plot of the poem.

Just holding The Odyssey makes my task feel daunting. It’s 350 pages of people who may have existed traveling back from a war that may have happened, and most of their adventures probably aren’t close to what really happened. The chance for boredom slaps me. I’d say that cracking the spine is like staring off a cliff, but the cliff offers two definitive options — walk away or jump — while Homer presents the third, even scarier choice of the slow fizzle of enthusiasm that leads to Cliff’s Notes.